Excerpt from “Letters to the Universe”

Who is Shonda? you may be wondering.

I realize I’ve been jumping around a bit, but in the linear arc of this journey—this writing journey, this prison journey, this life journey—the emergence of Shonda represents the lightning crash moment where nothing after would ever be the same.

When she arrived on the scene in late 2018 in the form of a Christmas card, my self-confidence was eroding. Despite a sporadic trickle of correspondence from incarcerated readers, my books remained unknown in the free world. The 120,000-word, meticulously edited and formatted file that was Consider the Dragonfly had fallen into a state of disrepair after the company formerly known as CreateSpace folded into Kindle Direct Publishing. A minor revision attempt sent the novel spiraling into chaos, leaving it with a slender inch of condensed text and fat, five-inch margins—a scrambled mess that even the talented Kelly Conrad could not unravel. My second book, With Arms Unbound, was languishing unread on the department’s aforementioned banned reading list. Again, a frustrating situation since much of my fanbase is behind bars. After an initial bump, Sticks & Stones had settled into an Amazon Best Sellers ranking in the high millions, just south of abysmal. It was becoming obvious that my nephew Jude’s first big royalty check would barely amount to the price of a few stuffed animals. And to top it all off, my greatest triumph, my magnum opus, On the Shoulders of Giants, had recently lost the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards . . . to a cookbook. (A cookbook!) It didn’t even merit an honorable mention. I sound whiny, I know. But it was Christmas and I was homesick. Moreover, I wasn’t writing, which always amplifies the critical voice in my head. I’m generally a glass-half-full kinda guy. And anyone who’s done time with me knows that I’m committed to the long view when it comes to my novels. For years, I had taken solace in NPR book critic Maureen Corrigan’s words: “Great books eventually find their audience.” But in December of 2018, I was beginning to wonder if mine were all that great.

Enter Shonda, a self-described nerdy girl and work-at-home mom who read Sticks & Stones and a handful of the essays in this book around that same time and felt compelled to write. The second oldest of seven children born to a social worker turned teacher and a Detroit autoworker with the soul of a poet; Shonda is one of the most intelligent, most intuitive people I’ve ever known. This was evident from the jump, but it was strikingly clear a couple months later when we began reading self-improvement books together—the genesis of what would later become the Astral Pipeline Book Club. Her chapter-by-chapter analysis read like scholarly commentary: sharp, insightful, and with an economy of words. Her ability to absorb, retain, and distill information bordered on preternatural. Even though she had never published a single essay, she quickly became one of my favorite writers. As hundreds of emails flowed between us, ping-ponging 2,000 miles back and forth across the continent, all the drift and inertia of 2018 began to evaporate. I was inspired by this peculiar and pragmatic woman, my polar opposite in many ways—reserved where I am impulsive, guarded where I can be unrestrained, disciplined where I tend to be disorderly. I’d never met anyone like her; a level 47 dungeon master in the lost art of listening, the still water to my babbling brook. And she believed in me(!) In my stories, in my message, in my mission. I would have never crossed paths with a woman like Shonda in my former life, unless she happened to be filling the tank of her minivan at a gas station I was robbing. In some ways I feel like I wrote her into my orbit, like her presence alone is a spoil of war . . . The War of Art.[1] But this was no time for celebration, no time for a victory lap. I had a novel to write. And my release date was rapidly approaching. It was time to get to work. I had already settled on the bones of the story, one that focused on the female prison experience. But suddenly, details were locking into place. The pages of my journal began to fill with scene ideas and snippets of dialogue. Shadows and silhouettes of characters pulled into focus. I could finally visualize Year of the Firefly’s heroine. No surprise she was a highly intelligent redhead. Art may not always imitate life, but life always informs art. This has been my experience at least.

That being said, Miranda McGuire is no carbon copy of Shonda. Intellect and hair color are where the similarities end. Shonda is far from a liberal activist, her father was not a bipolar and compulsive gambler, she did not have a baby in the Escambia County jail, and although she’s been to prison multiple times, this was only to visit me. She also does not use drugs. Thank God. It was her clean and focused mind that was able to reverse-engineer the colossal snarl that was Consider the Dragonfly and restore it to sanity, learning the subtleties of interior formatting in the process. Then she turned her attention to the other areas of the publishing world—cover design, copyrighting, marketing, ebooks. Her knowledge quickly surpassed mine. All I really know how to do is what I’m doing right now: sit cross-legged on this bunk with a pen in my hand and pad in my lap, the rainforest pumping though my earbuds on repeat, while I wrestle these words onto the page. The craft. This is where I’ve invested my time and energy over the years. And it has been a sound investment across the board; it changed my life, saved my life, altered the course of my destiny. But ever since this journey began, I had been waiting for someone out there to come along, someone who believed in the books, someone who shared my vision, someone to build with, someone who cares as much as I do . . .

Flip to the front of this book. Isn’t it captivating? That mountain-peak mailbox, the starlit sky, the river of city lights glowing in the distance. Beautiful, right? As a rule, it’s bad form to refer to one’s own book cover as “captivating” and “beautiful.” But I didn’t design it. This is Shonda’s handiwork. The authenticity stamp certifying that these words were written by a human and not generated by artificial intelligence? Conceived and designed by Shonda. This crisp and elegant typeface? Pure Shonda. The editing, the formatting, the part breaks. Shonda. The fact that for the first time in twelve years, a Malcolm Ivey book will be available in hardcover? I’ll give you three guesses.

In July of 2020, we founded Astral Pipeline Books. Never again would there be a blank space on the spines of my novels where the publishing company’s imprint belongs—the telltale mark of an amateur. Thanks to Shonda, I graduated from self-publisher to indie publisher. Big moment. Three years later, I still catch myself gazing at the logo; those spinning photons, that quasar. Tempus fugit, amor manet. Damn right. In the coming years, I envision a literary home for talented authors who might have otherwise given up on their dreams. And a book club with a registry of thousands. Maybe even hundreds of thousands. But if none of this happens, if I remain the only writer under the AP umbrella and we keep churning out these obscure prison novels every couple years for the duration, if the Astral Pipeline Book Club never expands beyond its two original members . . . I will still consider it a massive success. How could I not? Remember, in March of 2005—two months after George W. Bush was sworn in as President—a skeletal, crack-addicted, lost young man covered in blood-soaked bandages from police K-9 bites was staggering around central booking and detention, looking for a place to hang himself. The fact that I made it from there to here is a miracle. The fact that you’re holding this book in your hands is a miracle. Like Izzy says in the prologue of On the Shoulders of Giants, “Writing has given me an identity other than failure, loser, career criminal.” I couldn’t agree more.

Sidenote about Giants: Writer’s Digest magazine allows authors five years from the publication date of a given novel to enter it in their annual Self-Published Book Awards. You can enter as many times as you want within that window, but I never bothered to resubmit after being snubbed in 2017. I poured my soul into that novel. If those tight-assed judges couldn’t see the beauty and wonder in it, fuck ’em. The people I wrote it for—the forgotten, the lost, the state raised—all seemed to love it. They passed it around cellblocks and open-bay dormitories like it was the latest David Baldacci novel. This was all the confirmation I needed. But in 2020, Shonda talked me into entering it once more, just before the deadline . . . and it won. First place, mainstream/literary fiction category. Paid a thousand bucks.[2]

But books and business aside, Shonda is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Honest, kind, unwavering. I’ve never had a better friend. A lifetime ago, I remember lying on a slab of concrete at a Central Florida prison called Sumter Correctional, contemplating the busy night sky. At a time when other kids my age were thinking about prom and graduation, I was just beginning a nine-year bid in the Department of Corrections. Nine years seems like nothing now. A wisp of smoke. I’ve served twice that long on this current sentence alone. But at that age, nine years felt like an eternity. Dad had just died, old friends were fading, my girlfriend was long gone. Life as I knew it was changing. I remember looking up at the stars that night, lonesome as hell, imagining that somewhere beneath the same sky, a girl was getting ready to go out—brushing her hair, applying makeup, trying on outfits in front of a mirror; unaware that her life was on a collision course with mine. It took decades for our paths to align, but when she finally showed up, I knew exactly who she was: a lost prayer. A letter to the Universe, answered. My solitary girl. My quiet storm. Shonda.

1. If you’re a writer (or musician or a painter or a sculptor or a human being living on Planet Earth) and you have not read Steven Pressfield’s masterful book on battling resistance, do yourself a favor: buy it now. Your unlived life awaits.
2. I hereby withdraw my previous statement about tight-assed judges. Especially since I plan on entering this book in 2024.