In first grade I wrote a book. I think it was about a brown dog. In second grade I wrote another book. I don’t know what it was about. Both books were maybe 8, 12, or 20 pages in length with one or two sentences per page. They were illustrated by yours truly. The covers were made from wallpaper or shelf paper. The book about the dog had a brown cover that looked like wood paneling. The other book (it might have had spaceships in it) had colorful wallpaper with red and blue and shiny reflective silver. One of the books was selected for a program called young authors. As a young author, I got to visit another school (Valley Elementary) and meet with kids from lots of other schools. We were all young authors. At around the same time, I asked for a desk for Christmas. I was going to grow up and be a writer (and a baseball player and a doctor like the doctors on M.A.S.H.). That might have been the height of my literary career.
In those early years, I was a voracious reader. By kindergarten, I had read all of the Dr. Seuss books, In first grade I loved this series call The Great Brain, I also liked the choose your own adventure books. I read a lot of Shel Silverstein… over and over. Then the reading for fun stopped. It might have been an act of rebellion against my father or it might have been that by third grade and forth grade, our education system switches the focus of reading from fun to reading for information. From then on, the little reading and writing I did was for school projects or book reports that my father made me do. I was told I was good at writing… which only made me more shy about it. By the time I was in high school, English had become one of my least favorite subjects. I failed 12th grade English because we had to write a poem and recite it to the class. I’m pretty sure I wrote one, but I never felt good enough to present it. On the last day of presentations (because I had put it off a million times) I was asked if I was ready, and I said I wasn’t. The teacher said I’d have to take an F and would fail for the semester and I said, ok, I’ll take an F.
In college, my professor in freshman comp. encouraged me to pursue writing. He nominated an essay I had written for a university-wide publication. It wasn’t selected. I was thinking of doing pre-med at the time (still stuck on wanting to be a M.A.S.H. doctor) and my professor said I might want to switch to English. I blew his praise and advice off so that I could continue to do poorly in Calculus, Chemistry, and Bio… I’ve always been pretty stubborn.
A year later, I took an intro to creative writing class. The professor, Dave Kress, was this lanky guy who looked like he belonged in a punk rock band. He wore combat boots to class and I think the sides of his head were shaved with a floppy tuft of hair in the front – skater style. He might have actually played in a band, I can’t remember. Dave also encouraged me to pursue writing… and because I was really bombing in my math and science courses, I enrolled in the College of Liberal Arts as an English major. I was a lazy student who struggled with the traditional lit classes (Shakespeare, Victorian Novel, etc.), but did well in my writing classes. That’s when I started a literary journal, Rafters, and got interested in publishing. I wrote a little bit about that here. Dave became one of my fiction editors.
After graduation, when the classes and assignments stopped, the writing stopped. I stayed involved with literature in my role as a book editor, but I did very little reading outside of work, and even less writing. I had a brief period when I was commuting into Newark, NJ and later New York when I would spend some time reading and writing on the train, but it wasn’t anything that stuck. It wasn’t until three or four years ago when my interest in… writing? being a writer? poetry? was rekindled. My interest was starting to renew when I was dating a guidance counselor who was an English major and painted and had an artistic vibe. I was finding myself attracted to artistic types at the time. I wrote one or two poems for her – mostly about how we had a great connection but struggled to connect – she was always somewhere else. She really seemed to like the poems, but I think more than anything, she liked the effort. Nobody had done that for her before.
My interest really took off when I dated another writer/poet. The relationship itself sent me to poetry in search better words than I had or knew. Things were sometimes complex and poetry seemed to get it. She had books of poetry on her shelves and I’d sit and read while she got ready or while I was waiting for her to come home. I couldn’t tell you which books or poets she had, other than Robert Hass’ Sun Under Wood – I often picked that one to read – partially because I felt like it helped me see her previous life in California (Hass is a Bay Area poet). She also had a dormant blog that I read. It was short-lived, probably less than a year. She had a few poems posted and a handful of posts (much like mine) in which she’d talk about the struggle of getting into a writing routine. My stepmom had also found her poems and had one of them made into a bookmark for her as a Christmas gift. Ironically, one of our bigger arguments was over her desire to write and publish. Because it was being framed as her legacy, it was something I wanted to understand better (why is a book and not her friends or family her only legacy). My question came across as being unsupportive. It came from a place of insecurity, but it wasn’t intended to undermine. While I’d probably be a little jealous, I genuinely hope (hoped?) she gets those publications (though maybe not before I do – wink, wink).
I’d like to think I would have found my way back to poetry on my own, but I think I needed the highs and lows of those relationships to re-appreciate what it is poets try to do: this art of walking slowly and lightly; detailing nuance and complications; finding wonder in the everyday; and giving off small sparks of imagination and fire. I’m just starting to lean in to what feels like an emergence of sorts and also to what has always been there. I’ve finally started sending some poems out for publication. I’ve dug out a few copies of Rafters to remind myself of past gumption and improbable paths, and I’ve started to tweet and connect with some other writers. Today I ordered seven books of poetry from writers I haven’t read and I’ve been scrolling through screenshots of poems discovered not through the hands of a significant other, but mostly on my own.
One train came through
I believe this is from Andrea Cohen
our whistle-stop town.
Being two people, we
got on, and dreaming
out one window
went two places.
Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe
First stanza of “Catastrophe Is Next to Godliness” by Franny Choi
but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
I want an excuse to change my life.