Seven Years of "Could"

From Corporate Life to Novelist, a Dream Blooms in St. Louis.

Digging in with Joan Fernandez” is a weekly newsletter with ideas for you on shattering limits to reaching your true potential, told through bits from the life of Jo van Gogh (the woman that would not allow Van Gogh to die twice). Please sign up here.What difference can one person make?

Spring fluffs out her skirts in St Louis. Blossoms lace branches bare just weeks ago.

Song birds begin to twitter even as the slightest light brushes the eastern sky.

It is the season of beginnings.

Of the “could’s.”

My Book’s Born

Today, April 15, is my book’s release day.

Saving Vincent, A Novel of Jo van Gogh is officially on actual and virtual shelves!

Woot!

It’s a moment that’s come from a relentless press of seven years to get here.

Seven years since I retired from my Corporate America role to explore a new pursuit, to follow curiosity, to grapple with applying storytelling craft, to get a glimpse of the potential depth this form of creativity offers.

To face panic and imposter syndrome and temptations of worthlessness and failure and mistakes and self-doubt and . . . you get it.

And all along it was the word “could” that danced as a north star. A gift because I didn’t need to write. There was no one telling me what I should be doing.

It’s taken a long time for the expectations of career and culture to loosen their vice grips on my identity and instead for me to declare and act as accountable for my own life.

It’s carried a lightness: Pursuing a hard thing I could choose to do.

Perhaps it’s no surprise then, that I was gifted a little discovery this weekend because of “could.”

Party!

OK, if there’s a party to plan, we’re on it! My husband and I do love to socialize. So, a while back I realized I could celebrate the book’s release earlier than today by grabbing the weekend before my Pub Day to bash.

We picked a downtown location with lots of brick and an urban chic vibe. The evening held coolish temps perfect to ease the press of warm wishes. With my husband and daughter as hosts-with-the-most, they welcomed everybody.

Then it was my turn to make remarks.

In the audience, two friends from childhood elementary days, a college Bestie, a tight girlfriend group from Corporate Early Days, crackerjack sisters from my Marketing season, and sweet kinswomen in leadership. Book club companions and artistic wunderkind and spiritual adventurers. A wealth of neighbors and finally, faithful family.

All individuals that had played a part in the book’s arrival.

Let me give you a sense of the moment through a few excerpts:

“This book is a long time coming,” I began. “This is the story of Jo van Gogh and how she saved Vincent’s artwork from being forgotten. It’s taken me seven years to complete but its origin for me started long before that.”

I hold up the first book I’d ever written. A school project from elementary school in 1970 when I hung out with my two childhood friends. Pointing them out in the crowd, I joked, “They saw my writing talent early.”

“Fast forward 20 years to the early 80’s. I’m hanging out with my BFF. I’m an English major. So, I say to [I call her out her name], ‘I promise I’m gonna write a book someday.’ But when I graduated I had to pay rent so I got a job doing communications for a steel pipe distributor.”

From this beginning my remarks travel through years in NYC, a return to the Midwest, marriage and kids, the start of a new absorbing career. As I share, I point out the people in the crowd who heard me declare again and again how I would write a book someday. Yet, with each segment of time—first five-year increments, then by decade—that promise to write fell further and further from conscious thought, until forgotten altogether.

A wake-up call rushes the pledge back. Here’s where the rest of the crowd’s roles kick in. For as I trace the comeback—from my initial awkward blogging to the clumsy first draft to scrapping it all and beginning again—I call out names and groups that stepped up with encouragement at each juncture. Support as simple as a smile as neighbors passed my home office window and saw me working. Or a how a cheerful question, “How’s it going?” carried a kiss of recognition: “You’re doing it!”

I said, “And all through this time with every wave, every word of encouragement, every sweet question and comment–whether you knew it or not—you have all been a part of this journey.”

What do we call that?

It takes a village.

I finish my little speech. We all cheer for Jo and go on to have a fun evening.

The next day something surprising happens.

The Secret of Happiness

Like the sharp pull of air from a deep swim, I wake with a start. It’s the next morning. After weeks of restless insomnia, I lie motionless. It takes a few seconds to register how completely rested I feel.

It’s glorious.

I stretch and get up and the lightness continues. I feel rejuvenated. Refreshed after so many weeks of exhaustion.

Thinking back over the evening before I ponder my mood: The party feels less about me as author. Less about Jo van Gogh and bringing her story to life through my book.

Instead I think the energy comes from recognizing that a goal is completed. A promise kept. And that it took a lifetime of friendships to achieve it.

Together.

With you, too.

I have found the secret of happiness!

And all because of pursuing step-by-step not a “must” or a “should” but simply a dream of what I could do.

There’s a spring in my step: Today, Tuesday, April 15, 2025, seven years since I retired, forty-four years since I first made that promise in college: “I will write a book someday.”

I have.

It’s here.

Gratefully,

My book, Saving Vincent, A Novel of Jo van Gogh, publishes TODAY, April 15, 2025.

In the early twentieth century, a timid widow—and sister-in-law of the famed painter—Jo van Gogh takes on the male-dominated art elite to prove that the hundreds of worthless paintings she inherited are world-class in order to ensure her young son will have an inheritance.

Order Here!

P.S. BTW on the back flap of my fifth-grade book, Lisa, I wrote in 1970:

“Joan Snyder, born in a car in Virginia, is a born traveler. . .This is Joan’s first book. She hopes she will be able to write many more.” LOL!