Discover Your Wake-up Call

How a single, life-changing moment forced me to confront a promise from the past

Digging in with Joan Fernandez is a free weekly email newsletter of peeks into Jo van Gogh’s world, news bits about Van Gogh paintings, fresh narratives originating from others’ lives and my own. especially about women’s amazing stories — past and present. Please subscribe now.

This is how it started.

Or a more accurate way to put it, this is how a promise I’d made to myself in the past changed the course of my life.

Are you keeping the promise you’ve made to yourself?

The No. 1 regret of the dying: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” *

I came across that quote months after I was gut-kicked by a part of me I’d buried long before. A promise I’d made to myself burst out. Over the years, Reality had pushed it down the list of life priorities. Below putting food on the table. Getting my kids into a good school. Paying down debt.

Succumbing to the temptation to believe that my career was my identity.

I look back now with no regrets for putting those things first, including the failure of ego to ultimately bring worthiness. Each served a purpose. Until one day, like surging to the surface after holding my breath underwater, the first deep gasp of recall shocked the memory out of me.

It felt like a clarion call. A new choice.

At the pinnacle of a full, well-orchestrated, color-coordinated, occasional hair-on-fire routine, some wise (sneaky) part of me knew only a Big Jarring would get my attention. For my focus had been razor-honed to an entirely different direction for a very long time. It would take more than a nudge to get me to change course.

And to remember.

But when the door of memory cracked open, recall flung it wide open.

The Tale of How It All Began

Once upon a time a Girl made a promise.

She is a little blonde girl who loves to read books. When Mrs. Hamlin, her beloved school librarian leads Girl over to the bookstacks and pulls colorful worn books from the shelf, this Girl runs her fingers lovingly along their spines. “You’re such a book lover,” Mrs. Hamlin laughs with a pat on Girl’s shoulder, “You should write a book someday.” “Yes,” whispers Girl, hugging the books to her chest and blinking at the sudden warm feeling there.

“Someday I’ll write a book.”

Now Girl is a Teenager. She is in Advanced English classes in high school. She writes a short story about a teenage girl with torn pantyhose (torture device designed to make female legs sweat) and mismatched clothes and is the brunt of jokes. Yet, this is not autobiographical. Teenager’s clothes are nondescript neutrals. She obediently cultivates the be-good, stay-safe persona her parents taught her and so stays undercover, pleasant, hides in plain sight in the flood of bodies bolting down hallways between school bells. The character in Teenager’s short story is fictional, but for a while, as she wrote the story, she felt like she was her. Lonely, targeted. For it is only safe in the school’s “Student Editor” room (abandoned janitor closet) with other writing student friends where she cuts loose, tells jokes and opens up glimpses of who true Teenager is behind her adolescent insecurity.

Fast forward to college. Teenager is now metamorphosized into English Major. She wears the mantle like a light, fashionable, slightly dramatic cape above her flair jeans and platform shoes. Not the earnest cloak of erudite lit majors destined for grad school MFA programs. And even though English Major secretly wants to be intellectually cool like them, lit analysis makes her yawn and she’s grown impatient with masks (so naive!) and so artfully claims that she’s a lover of words and stories and poetry and theater and . . . ideas instead. “Someday I’ll write a book!” English Major frequently declares, dramatically. (Maybe a little too much?)

But upon graduation, the icy wallop of living on one’s own smacks English Major into a new cold identity: Third-string Scribbler. In her new job, she’s assigned to write employee benefit explanations and steel pipe distribution info sheets and articles explaining the manual assembly of teeny-tiny connections in circuit boards. She tries to include the people behind the topics (which helps), but still, it’s not enough. “Someday I will write a book,” she asserts, waving her chopsticks over budget-friendly Chinese food on the weekends with other Third-string twenty-somethings.

She is reassuring herself.

Third-string Scribbler becomes a Second-string Scribbler who becomes a Newsletter Rookie and then a Newsletter Maven and then a Research Newbie and then a Catalyst and then Alchemist while all along trading up from trendy retro mantles to posh capes and into indulgent cloaks, (alas, wearing high heels over these many years) until she is a Dynamo. Never mind that all that draping feels heavier. Stitched into the fabric are expectations and responsibilities pulled tight around her shoulders.

She can handle it.

That small promise. That “write a book” promise. It does not belong on Dynamo’s crowded agenda and working at 2 am and always, always fighting an overflowing Inbox fountain.

For her talk is peppered with memos and strategies and reports and metrics and findings and speeches and performance assessments and objectives. And all of this BTW is good. For its a school for critical thinking and leadership and being mentored/mentoring that develops into lovely friendships and sharing wonderful life moments with many talented and smart people. It is a very good place, though also a consuming place.

It eats up the years.

Until one day a joke kicks Dynamo in the gut.

Gut Check

She is with friends at lunch. They are kidding about what should be printed on their tombstones. “Finally! A meeting that ended on time!” and “No more PowerPoints!” They laugh, checking their watches (must get back in time for 1pm meetings) and go another round. This time Dynamo says, “There lies Joan, she always said she’d write a book, and she never did!”

Peals of laughter but oh! Ouch! Unnoticed, Dynamo doubles over, clutching her stomach. Something kicked right beneath the ribs.

She never wrote a book?

Not ever?

And suddenly, for good measure, the next crystal-clear thought slugs her gut again: Your book will never write itself.

I have a promise to keep.

Dynamo does not live happily ever after.

But Joan does.

My novel is Saving Vincent, A Novel of Jo van Gogh and will come out in April 2025. Soon! In the blink of an eye. I’m eager for you to read her story and see why her gumption has been a means for me to continue writing my own life story.

What an adventure this Promise is.

What’s yours?

Warmly,

*See palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware’s findings in Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

News about My Book

Permission to reprint excerpts from Vincent’s letters in hand! I use a fair number of quotes from Vincent van Gogh’s letters and others in the novel. Although his letters were written in the late 1800s and now in the public domain, the English translations of the correspondence were published just recently. With phenomenal help from a “permissions pro,” I started the process to request permission to quote the excerpts in April. I received my final permission on August 1. Phew!

New author website published! Check it out: Joan Fernandez Author Makes it feel like this whole adventure could be real! And I have a new tab about Speaker/Events.

Guest interviewed by sister Substackers:

Patty Warren

has been running a series of insightful interviews of the audacious authors who wrote short stories in the anthology Feisty Deeds: Historical Fictions of Daring Women .In her Patty’s Pages blog she shares essays about her own writer journey. Here’s my interview with Patty. Another historical fiction sister author is

Kathy Garland

who publishes an inspiring blog, “The Light Within Us,” about reclaiming sovereignty and agency. It was an honor to be featured in Kathy’s Uncovering the Unsung Hero behind Van Gogh.

Book Recommendations: About-face Moments: A missed train, and a return to Vietnam.

Order on Dipika Mukherjee's website

This story, Shambala Junction, is a FIND. Our protag, Indian-born Iris, has been raised in the States and thoroughly Americanized. The story opens when spoiled Iris is touring India with her controlling fiancé when she steps off their train for a quick refreshment. When a mishap causes her delay, she’s left behind at the Shambala Junction train station. Although Indian, she feels like a stranger.

It’s a clever character portrayal for through Iris’ eyes we see India first as a chaotic strange place, gradually becoming familiar as the people and places turn from first-impression to full-bodied people.  Penniless and unable to speak the language she finds herself embroiled in a stranger’s family emergency. She’s initially pressured and then wants to help them. Politics, poverty, family, crime comes through Iris’ eyes and it’s all relatable. Author Mukherjee casts light on the underbelly crime of infant kidnapping/trafficking. At times sobering, often warm – as the story progresses IIris finds an identity embracing both cultures, learning to become a better version of herself along the way.

Order on Nguyen Phan Que Mai's website

My husband served in Vietnam. As a non-commissioned Army officer barely 20 years old he led other soldiers on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and so learned firsthand the horrid disconnect of all the American and North and South Vietnamese war rhetoric and the reality of soldiers and civilians paying the price for political inhumanity.

So, it was with my personal connection to war – a connection I share with millions of people today – that I picked up the award-winning Dust Child. I’m grateful I did; I admire Que Mai’s complex tale. The book is told from five points-of-view, a white American veteran and his wife, two South Vietnamese sisters and a Black Amerasian man whose soldier father is unknown and got his mother pregnant in a brief encounter. Told in a dual timeline, the story moves back and forth between present day and South Vietnam in the ‘60s. There are no caricatures; each individual is achingly fleshed out, sketched out in each one’s hopes and dreams, naivete and desolation. Against the backdrop of each governing power’s propaganda, the individuals grapple with choices and mistakes, and ultimately, show their resilience. I love how Que Mai quotes Vietnamese words in their true spelling with diacritics intact instead of following the Western insult of Americanizing foreign words. Wounds from the Vietnam War still exist today. Dust Child is a sensitive, healing response.