No More Lousy Poetry

In my writing workshop I learned many things about the literary life, painstakingly writing one hideous poem after another that I lost later, thank God. The poems had one thing in common: Other than their collective lumpiness, all of them contained water. I started reading stuff about water, then stuff about swimming, then stuff about swimmers. Swimming issues were raised, swimming controversies contemplated, swimming echelons broken into swimming subgroups starting with the aqua babies and working up to the elite.

The poems had one thing in common: Other than their collective lumpiness, all of them contained water.

I found myself daydreaming about swim coaches and swim parents, swim boyfriends and swim enemies, swim joys and swim calamities. How well does a swimmer swim when they are irritated, I wondered, and how differently does one swim when one is in love? And then one day, or maybe it was night, this naturally talented tall chick with crazy feet living in the middle of a family with a challenging destiny in the middle of Kansas in the middle of universe, in the middle of the world appeared. Pip! Pip in Catholic school swimming with pseudo swimmers and a priest disguised as a coach who is in fact a big Bjorn Borg fan. Pip walking down the hallway of her adolescence sporting unromantic hair. There’s Pip stealing raspberry lip gloss from Woolworths. There’s Pip crouching on a starting block getting ready to demolish the world. I don’t know where she came from, but it all seemed real to me, and I knew that if I did my job right, that if I was generous and open and noble and true like a weird person who probably only exists in books, and I listened very, very carefully to all that was going on around her, then I would eventually come as close to the people in her life as to know them because through my years as an unofficial psychiatrist, I’d learned that the more people are understood, the better they shall be loved, even the fake ones.

So that was the goal: to make it as real as I saw it.

And to be fair, here are the obstacles: everything. Plus the fact I’d never won a medal for anything or written anything longer than a good letter. Plus the fact that I’m a mediocre recreational swimmer. Plus the fact that I have three children and they make a lot of noise. Plus everything again.

Five years passed. I worked so hard as to become crazy. I considered seeking professional help until one day my husband looked at me and said: “If you don’t do something with that manuscript right now, I’m going to throw your computer out the window.” We live on the top floor, so I said “OK” and what happened next was the surprise of my life.

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Nicola Keegan lives in Paris with her husband and three children. Swimming is her debut novel.