poetry and past selves
As someone who began "writing" before I could form or understand letters, I try to imagine that there was any other choice but this one that finds me here. And by "writing" I mean scribbling wavy lines in a flimsy spiral notebook my aunt bought me, so it was pretty obvious the way things would go. In fact, I had specifically requested the canvas tote bag filled with paper pads, notebooks, and writing tools for Christmas. This was after my dad had taught me the alphabet by bribing me with chocolate, but before the letters above the chalkboard of my kindergarten class made sense to me. Before I triumphantly broke the code of reading one night in a winter parking lot by sounding out the Jewel/Osco sign. (I'm sure "p-h-a-r-m-a-c-y" threw me for a loop.).And there were books to be sure in those early years. A children's illustrated bible. A collection of hunting and fishing manuals in a wooden bookcases. The battered black and white checked m Mother Goose. My grandmother's set of illustrated encyclopedias. They all fascinated me in a way that I realize now may have been unusual for that age. Or even that time, when already television pulled at childhood attention, and I watched it, but it was much more of a passive thing than I felt while reading or even touching books. I already loved horror movies, and all the spooky books that I devoured once I could read. First from the library, then in sacks that another aunt provided after she'd read them.
There are a few moments of writing I remember from my early years in school. Learning the graceful swoops of actual cursive in the second grade. Struggling with grammar homework in grade 3 but still managing to win the all school spelling bee. How my favorite part of the day was when the teacher would let us put our heads down on our desks and read to us. My favorite hour each week the trip to the library to pick out the week's reading materials. The famed Scholastic book fairs and regular book orders where I'd circle a dozen options for my mom when we could only afford 1 or 2 if that. Our first essay test, 6th grade social studies, where I was determined to memorize facts from the Sumerians through the Egyptians, then spit them out in written form, and scored highest in the grade. Or the science/social studies fair where my entry was a history of writing beginning with hieroglyphics that I took very seriously and snagged a first place designation. By the end of elementary school, I kept notebooks where I plotted horror novels a la Stephen King while my parents left me to babysit my sister, where we'd spend the rest of the time eating candy that cost a dime at Osco and watching carefully chosen horror from the video store.
In junior high, I planned to write a horror novel about a haunted house for a district-wide contest, but waffled and turned in a kids coloring book I'd made with stencils instead. It was the year we read Poe for the first time and I realized English class could also be a link to the morbid, the macabre, and the horrific and therefore, was all-in. I was well into adult-level reading at this point, and regularly hit up the public library with my dad for novels and books about ghosts, urban legends, and aliens, which we'd carry in overflowing stacks in our arms back to the car.
I didn't writ the first poem until I was 14, in English class during the verse unit in the spring after a year of writing strident 5 paragraph essays and reading Romeo & Juliet. That spring, I would also begin keeping my first diary. It was blue with a lock and some clouds on the cover. In it, I wrote the first poems that weren't assignments about boys and kittens and whatever 14-15 year old girls think about. Later I'd write more on notebook paper, on pen pal stationery. High school also brought writing articles for the school paper, winning a few random essay contests, and, later, after the theater bug had bitten me hard senior year, a one-act play about fairytales.
So much more would come, perhaps a whole blog posts worth at a later date, but is this young writer I've been thinking about a lot lately. I think, at this age, I sometimes forget the magic that writing is. The rush of excitement when sharing or publishing work. I've been doing it such a long time. So much of it often feels like routine or racking up publications/awards/books, but I wish I could have bottled the excitement I used to have over seeing my work printed on the page. Or even later the excitement of publishing the first poems online in those fledgling days of online journals. They coincided with the rise of blogs, as well, so even this space could feel magical sometimes in ways it doesn't really now. A few weeks back I got out my very detailed writing scrapbooks with, for years, every clipping, every award, every bit of reading memorabilia from my first years of writing and publishing and wished I could get back to that feeling that so much was on the horizon. Probably a feeling you can only have when you are new to the writing world. I feel it in glimmers now, perhaps more than waves. And sometimes it has more to do with the work itself than sharing it or sending it out.
That little girl who scribbled nonsense in notebooks would be so surprised at the writer I am now and it makes my chest ache. For her, it was a just a tool to spend her days in a dreamlike state. And maybe it still is for me as an adult. And yet, when I am struggling, it helps me feel less adrift. Less apocalyptic (even if I am writing about the apocalypse.) I also think about how long its been getting even here, how much I invested in rather unimportant and frivolous endeavors. Struggling with the feeling that writing, especially poetry, seems to be foolish and self-indulgent in a world that presents new and very real horrors every day. Though, admittedly, even the jaded 14 year old who wrote poems in her dairy would be gobsmacked that it became a way of life and existing in the world she never would have imagined.
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