There are few book series more famous than Chicken Soup for the Soul. With more than 250 titles in print (and counting), and sales exceeding 100 million books in more than 40 languages, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who’s still in the dark about these heart-warming anthologies filled with real-life stories of inspiration and hope.
And this month, a Niverville writer is proud to join the Chicken Soup family. Jan Kendall St. Cyr’s story, “Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow,” has been published in the most recent entry in the series: Chicken Soup for the Soul: My Crazy Family.
“This is quite surreal for me,” says St. Cyr. “I have to say, though, it’s a hilarious story. The editors kind of gave you a little bit of what they wanted in these stories, some guidelines. Well, I have a crazy family, so I’ve got fodder. I’ve got stuff to write about!”
St. Cyr says that the genesis for the story comes from her husband Gerry’s longing for hair after going prematurely bald.
“He was only in his fifties, and he wanted hair,” she says. “Like, it was just this midlife crisis. So he finally hit on this sort of international men’s hair club or whatever. It didn’t matter that it was seven hours away and in a whole different country and that we had to be there every four weeks and this hair was coming from the temples of India!”
The benefit was that Gerry could obtain a high-quality hairpiece that looked natural. The catch was that they had to attend regular monthly appointments, which entailed a lot of travel.
“The end result is that we lost interest in going to these crazy appointments all the time where they would re-fuse this custom hairpiece on his head. So we were missing appointments, and it was getting a little ratty. We were running out of the special adhesive, and the hair was becoming loose. We tried Krazy Glue and all kinds of stuff to get this thing to stay on his head.”
This was getting to be a bit crazy on its own, but to make it even crazier Gerry found himself needing to wear a bald cap overtop of the hairpiece, because he wasn’t happy with the way it looked.
“Well, we were at the mall one day, and we’re coming out into the parking lot,” St. Cyr says. “The wind got a hold of Gerry’s hat, and the hat goes flying in the air. He grabbed the hat, but not until the hair went flying. It was crowded—like, there was a group of people all around—and this hairpiece started rolling like a tumbleweed through the parking lot, and everybody’s standing there, staring. Everyone was just shocked. And I’m like, ‘Oh my god, Gerry. Let it go.’”
St. Cyr says she started running toward the truck, thinking he was going to run with her. But no, when she turned to look back, Gerry was running after the hair.
“I’m crouched down by the truck, ready to pee my pants. I’m dying laughing. And then this big trucker guy just stomps down on the hairpiece, picks it up, and hands it to Gerry. He goes, ‘Shit happens.’ Gerry grabs the hair, shoves it in his jacket, and runs to the truck.”
On the way home, they laughed so hard that they thought they might throw up.
“We’re on our way back to Niverville and he says to me, ‘I think I need to just let this go,’ and he takes this ratty thing out of his jacket and whips it out the window. I watched through the rear-view mirror as it lands on the side of the road, looking more like a dead animal than something you’d actually wear on your head.”
Wake-Up Call
St. Cyr says that it wasn’t easy getting to the point in her writing where she felt confident enough to send out her work.
“I had a bit of a wakeup call in the sense that things were happening with my kids,” she says. “They were making some headway out there [in their creative pursuits]. I had written since I was young. It was my cathartic way of dealing with emotional issues and different things that were going on in my life. But I kind of felt like I wasn’t really being true to myself, and I read this thing one day that said, ‘Your success is necessary.’ I just thought, wow. What does that mean? Am I out here cheerleading for everybody else, and not feeling that doing something that’s successful [for myself] is important? It made me feel like, ‘You know what? I think it is. I have something here and I need to just explore it a little more.’”
Through reading online blogs and writing advice, St. Cyr came across some information in January 2017 about three upcoming Chicken Soup for the Soul books—and the editors were looking for submissions. Even better, St. Cyr felt that she could personally relate to all three of those books’ themes. The deadline for submitting stories was the end of the summer, so she immediately got to work.
“I worked all through the summer, and I did it,” she says.
Then, after submitting the stories, she just let it go. She knew that each of these anthologies received thousands and thousands submissions, so her chances of being chosen were small. One of the books, she found out later, received almost seven thousand stories.
“So I just did this, I sent it out there, and then I went on my merry way.” But St. Cyr adds that when the following January came around, when she knew the editor would be sending out acceptance letters, it was very much at the back of her mind. “Not in any great way, though, where I was panicked about it or feeling nervous or anything like that. I just thought, ‘Well, if this doesn’t happen, then okay, I did my part.’ That’s all I felt I could do.”
In the middle of January, she opened her email one day and found a message from one of the editors, saying that her submission to My Crazy Family was being considered. It had made it onto a short list. She signed the attached release forms, still not thinking she would make the final selections.
Two weeks later, she got the good news.
“It still hasn’t really hit me!”
But how does Gerry feel about his midlife crisis being the showpiece of her first published work?
“Oh, he’s good,” St. Cyr reassures. “He’s such a great support system to me, so he’ll take the hit for me to write the story. I mean, it’s just one of those classic stories!”
