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Dear Reader,
I'm on vacation this week. My husband and I are wandering around the Blue Ridge Mountains. Instead of running previous columns, I've asked some friends of mine to fill in for me. Today's guest column is written by author and storyteller Joel ben Izzy.
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
www.DearReader.com
From Guest Columnist Joel ben Izzy....
It is, as Suzanne says, so good to read with friends. Though I've long known this, I never realized how good it was until I wrote a book.
As a traveling storyteller, I was accustomed to seeing every face in my audience. For twenty years I wandered the globe, gathering and telling tales always, it seemed, among friends--such is the life of a storyteller. I would never have written a book, but for a strange twist my own story took, on the day I went for a surgical procedure and awoke to discover I could no longer speak. At first doctors said the loss was temporary, but later they decided it was permanent.
So it was I found myself living inside a story as strange as any I had ever told. At first, my life crumbled--not just as a storyteller, but as a husband and father to two young children. Over time, though, my stories came back to me like old friends, helping me find meaning in my loss. New ones came, too, from a great teacher, who guided me from darkness into light. Eventually, my journey seemed worth sharing with others, so I set fingers to keyboard.
Day after day, I stared at the screen, trying to tell my story, I pictured the reader I hoped would someday appear: kind and caring, open and curious, with a sense of humor--a friend I had not yet met. After five years of writing my story became a book--"The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness".
Mailing off the final version felt like putting a message in a bottle. I waited anxiously for months, until it finally appeared on the shelves, then waited more. One day an e-mail came--someone in Boulder, Colorado, had read it, and shared his own story of a curse turned to a blessing. A woman in Maine wrote that she had read the book with her father as he lay dying, and how they spent his last days sharing the stories they'd never told.
Each day brought new responses. One of the nicest came when I read in "Dear Reader" how my story had touched Suzanne. She shared some of her story as well, and forwarded the e-mails from readers, stories that filled me with gratitude. Suzanne and I began trading stories and--though we've yet to meet in person--have become book friends.
Since then, my little book has taken on a life of its own. It's been optioned for film and being developed as a play. My publisher sends me foreign editions--Chinese, Russian, Japanese and German, so far. What a strange feeling to hold a book you've written, but cannot read. And it's so fun to see the covers--you can find them at:
http://www.emailbookclub.com/photo/izzy.html
The paperback has just come out, and there's no telling where it will go. But I hope it finds those readers who need it.
Because it's so good to read with friends.
Joel ben Izzy
www.storypage.com
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