04-13-2023 Howard Magazine - Flipbook - Page 48
“I likened the publishing
process to putting myself out there,
dating. You need calluses on your heart.
I won’t say I didn’t shed tears,
but I thought, these people don’t
know me. If they met me,
they would give me a chance.”
— Michelle Paris, author
“As crazy as this sounds, I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to
have to clean this up,’” she recalls. “I said, ‘Get to the sink.’ And
he fell forward and hit his head on the mirror and passed out. I
called 911 right away, and I gave him CPR until [medics] came.
It felt like it was forever. To this day, it still feels like it was forever,
even though it was probably just a few minutes.”
When the [first] responders arrived, they told Michelle to go
outside. “It was February but it wasn’t that cold in Florida,” she
says. “I didn’t have any shoes on. And my neighbor came over and
she stood with me and they wheeled him down our driveway. I
saw his arm just dangle, and that’s when I went, ‘Oh God, this is
bad.’”
Mitchem died of a heart attack at the age of 42. Paris was 40 at
the time.
Adding to Paris’s trauma, the couple had been in the process
of adopting a child from China. She needed time to decide if she
wanted to go through with it, but that’s not what she got.
“I let the agency know that he had died, and a few weeks later, I
got a call from them,” Paris says. “I still remember this. I mean, it
cuts me to this day. This young woman said, ‘I hate to have to tell
you this, but we’re canceling your application because you’re no
longer married and we don’t accept single adoptions.’
“I remember feeling like I was going to throw up. I had to
mourn that as well.”
Heartbroken, Paris moved back to Maryland in 2007, settling
in Columbia and keeping her job as a meeting planner. To help
her process everything she had experienced, she signed up for a
non-credit writing class at Howard Community College in 2008,
taught by local novelist Loree Lough.
“Many of them had ideas but they didn’t have a clue what to do
with them,” Lough says of her students, who met in a Centennial
High School classroom.
Paris definitely fit into that category. She wasn’t sure if she was
to write a memoir or a work of fiction.
“On that first day, Loree said something that really resonated
with me,” recalls Paris. “She said, ‘If I give each of you the same
scenario, each of you will write it differently. Everyone has their
own style.’ That has really stuck with me.”
When the class ended, Paris and three other students — Deliah
Lawrence, Susan Yanguas, and Lisa Trovillion — formed a writing
club, meeting every few weeks to talk about their work. “We
started out focused on the writing, and we became friends,” says
Lawrence.
“New Normal,” set mostly in Columbia and Baltimore, takes on
the serious topic of grief, but does so with a light, even zany touch
through the main character, Emilie — Michelle’s alter ego.
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| Spring 2023 | howardmagazine.com