Yesterday, I switched gears on my NAPOWRIMO exploits and started something I have a few notes for that's a bit more narrative in focus. I was laughing all morning that, yes, here I was writing mostly about birds again, then remembered this little draft tucked away in my drawers. Written so long ago, the paper, three ring notebook and lined, is yellowed and more brittle than it was originally. I think I was 16 when I wrote it after waking up from a dream about a dead seagull on a beach. I had moved on from drafting short poems in my blue diary and at that point, had taken to writing drafts on notebook paper and odd bits of pen-pal stationary. I still have most I imagine--all really, really bad, though maybe a bit better than the diary poems when I was 14. I didn't write anything like regularly in those days. Most of my life was school and otherwise lounging on my bed listening to music or reading. I probably would have told you I wanted to be a teacher of some sort (this was before my marine bio obsession.) The year before, it had been an interior designer.
"Poet" was not something anyone actually did, of course. Writer maybe...and I loved writing for the school newspaper and the very next year, would be a section editor. Maybe a journalist or a novelist, but never a poet. Not in my world. But still, I occasionally turned my attention that way--to verse--long after I had started writing for school assignments. This was also around the same time I made my very first artist book endeavor for our Scarlet Letter, though I really didn't know that's what it was. As I became involved with theatre my senior year, I thought maybe I could be a playwright. (though if you'd asked me,in my dreams, I was a Broadway songstress--hilarious since i am a poor singer.) There was a burgeoning Poetry Club that met after school with about 5 people in it, but I kept missing meetings due to rehearsals.
By then, by virtue of a charismatic AP Bio teacher I was being pulled toward science and environmental concerns, and the pieces I wrote for the paper reflected this, as did my decision to go to school in North Carolina that year. But still, I carried the writing with me--along with my electric typewriter and a penchant for perusing lit mags in the UNCW library between classes. A roommate, having again found me cross-legged on the floor of my dorm room again, typewriter in my lap, said as much as I seemed to write, I'd surely be a famous writer some day. I guess I am still kind of waiting to get there...but until I returned to the midwest, it was mostly prose and plays I was trying to write.
Sometimes, I think I should throw out all these drafts--those and the ones on wafer thin typing paper from college and my first submissions. The ones scribbled on random student government flyers, boring lecture programs, and class notes. The ones written during that last year of MA where i was finally making progress--some handwritten, some typed on my little word processor. Or after, the folders organized by year up to the point where I started organizing by project electronically in the mid-aughts.This makes it harder to determine exactly when something was written except by memory--everything lumped together in a book manuscript, largely since I write a lot of poems in a blogger file or dropbox doc and then just organize them by project, but rarely do I print out and retain individual poems. And ultimately, I suppose, once there were books, those are the final record of a span of work. Obviously those early drafts are really embarrassing and just take up drawer space, but they are also kind of endearing. They help me remember the years of trying to get where I am now, even when I have doubts it's where I belong or should be at all.
