Suzanne Beecher

Dear Reader,

You're in for a treat. This week you'll be able to read the First, Second and Third place winning entries in the 2025 Write a DearReader Contest. In the coming weeks I'll also be featuring a number of Honorable Mention columns.

My yearly writing contest is all about having fun. You don't need to be a writer to enter. And from the notes added with this year's entries, I think people did indeed have a lot of fun.

"Suzanne, Thank you for hosting this contest every year. It's always fun to write with friends." -- TJ R

"I am sending a poem I wrote (as I did win an honorable mention for my work in 2024!)  Again, thank you for the unexpected but very exciting nod to my work last year! It's opened up my mind to trying more writing in my 'free' time! Poetry has become my fun way of expressing my creativity along with painting for 2025.Thanks again Suzanne for inspiring us to stretch and grow!" -- Karen M.

"A writer I am not, even writing letters was always a chore. Conversations are my forte and come naturally to me whether they be with strangers or friends. The writing contest is out of my comfort zone but every year the thought hovers, maybe give it a try. So here it is!" -- Ruth D.

Writing down your thoughts is a powerful way to soothe your soul and find joy. Sometimes when I start a column, I think I know what I'm going to write about, but soon I'm turning the corner and writing about something I had no idea I needed to say.

Thank you to everyone who entered this year's contest. I highly recommend that you keep writing, even if it's just for 5 minutes each day. It's great therapy, and heaven knows this crazy, bubble blowing, cookie baking, quilt making writer needs all the help she can get.

Congratulations to this year's winners!

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@firstlookbookclub.com

P. S. This week we're giving away 10 copies of the book Lightbreakers: A Novel by Aja Gabel. Click here to enter for your chance to win. 

Maya

In the beginning, there was happiness.

Maya remembered how nervous Noah had been when they met, clenching and unclenching his hands and repeatedly brushing a single dark curl off his forehead. The curl always fell right back, the act fruitless. At first this disoriented Maya, seeing how nervous he was despite being attractive. And though she was an artist who believed the very idea of objective beauty was suspect, she had to admit he 'was' objectively beautiful. In the years to come, she often caught people staring at his aristocrat cheekbones, his flop of dark hair, his broad and perfectly articulated shoulders. But when he spoke to her that first time, he stammered, tripping over the academic phrases she'd used from her training in art history, and almost immediately he confessed, "I'm sorry, I only really know science."

He had wandered into her student symposium talk, which wasn't technically public, but the way he carefully crept in and took a seat behind the professors made it seem like he'd been invited. She'd been presenting on a Japanese photographer she admired, who had been a major inspiration for her own painting practice. When the talk was over and the congratulations offered, the professors dispersed. The stranger hung around, waiting to speak to her.

"That's all right," Maya said. "Art is for everyone." She felt stupid for blurting out a trite aphorism, but he gulped it right up. She felt like taking it back would be taking it from him. Her offhand thought was that she was safe.

She asked what kind of science he studied, assuming he was a graduate student, if an older one. He was white and had the same look of the intense white guys in the math department who had a nearby seminar at the same time as hers. He mumbled that he actually worked for JPL, the NASA research lab, as a physicist. 'Oh', she thought, 'so he's smart, I'm in trouble.' As the room emptied, they remained talking. At one point, when neither of them moved for a spell, the motion-sensor lights flicked off.

"Oh no," Maya said, but Noah didn't seem fazed. In the darkness, he asked her to go out with him. When she laughed, delighted, the lights came back on.

They went to dinner right then, to a nearby taco stand, where they sat on folding chairs on the sidewalk. She told him that her talk was for her nearly completed master's in modern and contemporary art, focusing on the intersection of photography and painting, but that she wasn't sure if she wanted to continue on the doctoral track. She had a BFA in painting, and sometimes that was what she really wanted to do, paint. She told him some people said painting was dead, which she strongly disagreed with. That was like saying handwriting was dead.

"But handwriting 'is' dead," he said, and this made her laugh again, at how plainly and earnestly he said it.

She was giddy with happiness. Any awkwardness fizzled away. They lingered with empty plates and shouted conversation at each other over the roar of passing motorcycles.

Now, looking back, she understood that Noah's earnestness was a kind of hope that she—and this taco night, this electricity between them—could propel him away from his sadness. But no, at that point, she didn't know about the sadness. She wouldn't know about it until their fourth date and two sleepovers later, when she found a picture of a baby at the bottom of a drawer, beneath a bottle of Tylenol and a box of Band-Aids. All she knew on that first night, as he dropped her off in front of her apartment, was that something in him was splayed out, something that she could put back together if she could only gather it all up in her hands.

Later, she would understand this as her impulse toward caretaking: Noah harboring a wound, Maya desperate to mend it. And even later than that, she would understand that his sadness was a sediment layer, never far away, waiting beneath everything in him.

"Wait," he said through the car window. "Will you come out with me tomorrow?"

The way he'd asked her, "will you" instead of "do you want to," implied he needed her to come out. 'Will you, do you have the will inside you to be with me.' She would and she did, for years after, even when she began to realize that being with him was not the simple answer they'd both thought it might be.

Someone had asked Maya this question—"How did you meet your husband?"—at the museum where she worked. It was the kickoff cocktail party for the fundraising campaign she had organized herself. She knew she should have felt pride, but standing in the airy gallery surrounded by the wealthiest people on the museum's roster, she was only itchy with boredom. The woman standing in front of her was wearing trousers and a silk blouse that Maya recognized as Gucci, the kind of matching that was curated at a shop on Rodeo Drive, an onthe-nose pairing that indicated the person had no actual personal style.

But Maya had to be vivacious and interesting to this woman. It was her job as development manager, as someone in charge of extracting money from wealthy dilettantes.

The question—"How did you meet your husband?"—was not uncommon, especially after people found out Maya was married to a scientist, as though science and art were incompatible. But today she hesitated before answering. This woman was staring at her, her expression expectant beneath a smear of gold eyeshadow. Caroline, Maya's boss and good friend, appeared before them, her smile tight.

"Maya?" Caroline said, laughing a little. "What, did you forget how you met your husband?"

What Maya was trying to describe was a delicate balance between what it had felt like then and what it felt like now. Then: lightness, the promise of the unknown. Now: Even though so much was known, there remained an unknown slice. But this slice was not light, not a promise. Only gray space on a map, unexplorable land.

Maya blushed. "Oh, sorry. I was just remembering it. He wandered into a talk I was giving to my graduate professors," she said, making it simple. But then she said, "When we got to talking, it felt like there was so much potential for happiness. Like we were two sides of a convoluted math equation. And once you solved for everything, all the variables or imaginary numbers or whatever, there we were. My flaws and needs accounted for in his strengths, and vice versa."

Caroline and the woman continued to stare at her, uncomprehending.

"He's a physicist but he mostly works in mathematical modeling," Maya said.

"Ah," the woman said. "One forgets math is the basis of everything." "I don't know," Maya said. "The ancient cave paintings in France might have you believe otherwise."

Caroline shot her the quickest look—'What are you doing?'—before turning back to the woman. "Susan, that reminds me, have you read that essay in the Alexander Calder exhibition book? About his use of the Fibonacci sequence and geometry principles? It's honestly very fascinating. Here, Sam can grab you a copy. Come this way."

And like that, Caroline had saved her. Holding her flute of warm champagne, Maya scanned the party. Attendees were eating the passed mini-quiches and standing an appropriate distance from the art on the walls. Every now and then someone would uproariously laugh over the mellow sounds of the live jazz trio playing in the corner. Maya spotted the museum's wealthiest targets, the couple with property in both the Beverly Hills flats and the actual hills, being charmed by the young ceramicist she'd invited, a long-haired Korean American man in loose carpenter pants and a threadbare T-shirt. She tried to catch his eye, to share a glance that would say, 'Both of us Asians in this sea of white wealth, huh?' But he didn't meet her eye, and she realized with an uneasy pang that to him, she wasn't a peer. He was the artist, while she was the establishment, the suit.

Later, after donations had been taken or at least promised, and the crowd began to thin, Caroline found Maya once more. They'd been in college together, both art majors, but Caroline was more levelheaded and ambitious, always lining up internships and informational interviews. After school, she had dated around a couple of years before meeting Vincent, and then, like clockwork, she went to business school, bought a house in Los Angeles, and had a baby. Caroline had always been more grown-up than Maya, and Maya should have known that one day Caroline would hire her, which was exactly what happened when Maya's painting career stagnated and she was desperate for a change. Maya had been unqualified for this job, but she learned InDesign and the donor database and how to ask people for money without actually asking them, and the art she loved, always. They had a Robert Irwin at the museum, installed outdoors, and she was lucky to eat lunch some days while staring at it.

"You and Noah are 'math equations'?" Caroline said, bumping Maya with her hip.

"No, we're one equation. Two sides."

"Okay," Caroline said. "Maybe the champagne is going to your head." "She asked the question!" Maya protested.

"She didn't want a real answer."

Caroline took a napkin to a damp stain on Maya's silk shift. "You need soda water."

"I need . . ." Maya started to say. 'A new job. Something to paint.'

(continued on Tuesday)

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