In the seventh grade when Mrs. Spangler, my bespectacled English teacher, announced to my parents that I had a "gift with language"and predicted I would go on to do "great things" in the world of literature when I was grown, I heaved a sigh of relief. My quest for greatness and purpose had been resolved. I would become a writer.
But what if Mrs. Spangler was wrong?
What if I exposed my gift to public scrutiny and discovered I had no gift?
If Mrs. Spangler was wrong, I had no back up gift.
If Mrs. Spangler was wrong, that meant I was ordinary.
As long as I never tested her theory, I could mythologize this interior muse, this special something that allowed me to feel set apart and to get through the ensuing years of creative compromises and through the eventual, hapless mediocrity endemic to child rearing, toilet scrubbing and aging with at least a modicum of interior respectability.
Whether I was motivated by intellectual and creative hubris or by a need to effectuate a bohemian standard is not clear, but in my only year of college I enrolled with a double major in both art and English. While the professor in my creative writing class greeted all of my efforts with much enthusiasm, this was not so in the other more technical and rigorous English classes where I failed miserably. What is the point of diagraming a sentence? I could see the relevancy in breaking down the visual landscape if we were preparing for a bank heist, but these are words. If you lay them out in a sentence and they don't sound right, you simply reorder them until they do. Isn't that writing?
Evidently, I was alone in my approach to the craft and also soon realized, inflated in my belief that I had skills as a visual artist because on the dreaded evaluation day at the end of the year the head of the Art department suggested I stick with my English major. This was terribly depressing since I had just come from being told the opposite by the head of the English department. I took this as a sign that I was simply not meant to go to college.
But that was okay. I was still a writer.
I moved to New York City and worked as an administrative assistant to the Vice President of Hardcover at the New American Library. I typed letters, filed pending book proposals, ferried endless vats of coffee to my boss and to the boardroom and learned that almost all authors of decent standing crave thin-sliced pastrami on rye with Russian dressing.
At some point during my brief tenure there and in an inexplicable fit of confidence, I sent some of my poetry to The Yale Literary Magazine. The upshot from that came as a visit from the editor and while he did not consider the poems I had submitted to be worthy of publication, he felt differently about those he read during our visit and offered to publish one of them. He also felt I should be writing full-time and sent a pleading letter to my father in Connecticut attempting to solicit his financial support on my behalf.
That letter alone was worth the price of submission.
It was a full page of gilded accolades, the sort that take your breath away and leave a self-deprecating, underachiever like myself convinced that surely this must be a mistake. It was a letter only another writer, a poet, could write closing with the flourished psalm, "I am doing this for Susan, no, for what she will one day write. And let us hope that when she writes she mentions both of us -- for those poets mention live forever."
Oh yeah.
As an English major himself, my father was very proud. He made many copies of the letter and sent them out to all of our relatives. He then he sent me back to the city on the five o'clock train. After all, I had work in the morning.
After that I became a wife.
Eventually, I became a mother.
But I was still a writer.
And I did write. I wrote hundreds of letters, Christmas cards and grocery lists. As a young mother, I wrote glowing accounts of baby's first steps in a scrapbook and reordered the table of contents and topic sentences in countless elementary-school book reports and science projects with the dedication and finesse of a Bronte sister.
After all, I was a writer and as everyone knows, if you don't exercise your gifts, eventually they will atrophy and go away.
And while those around me in the mundane hills of suburbia submerged themselves in the culture of ordinary with mindless but dedicated abandon, I calmly tolerated the tedium and carried out all of my perfunctory duties with the requisite posture of obligatory martyrdom. In spite of the relentless press of mediocrity against my soul I thrived because I would say to myself, "I am not like the others."
I am a writer.
For fifty-six years I have courted inclusion. I have raised three children, sheltered far too many animals and learned to speak husband fluently. I've designed lines of greeting cards, artist rubber stamps, and jewelry, had numerous freelance illustration jobs from corporations to co-ops, and sold my shrines, prayer dolls and paintings in galleries and specialized shops in four states and two countries.
Yet the brightest light shines in the darkest corner of my attic where there are several large boxes filled with copies of correspondences and lengthy emails to friends spanning four decades alongside several others stuffed with poetry, prose, sketches and the ritual notations of an ordinary life recorded on hand-drawn calendars.
I keep solid, leather journals in which I chronicle my exceptional interior delusions with a near pathological obsession. These words, held captive in my brain and assembled onto paper, are all I have with enough potential to distinguish my soul from that of the sodden lump it otherwise might be. I keep them safe and well fed.
My world is full of papers filled with words: handwritten, typed and computerized.
I am a writer.
And in all this time I have never published
one
single
word.
