As a journalist, I love words. In fact, I really cannot remember a time when words did not fascinate me and, ultimately, inspire me. I was hooked on books at an early age, as well. I read every one of the Hardy Boys books, eventually moving to Agatha Christie to get my fix of mysteries. By the time I was in high school, I was enamored with the complete works of William Shakespeare and allowed myself to be transported to the Victorian London of Charles Dickens, the Antebellum South of Mark Twain and the New England landscape of Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
As a college student, I traversed the Key West beaches with Ernest Hemingway and spent some quiet time sitting beside the cozy cottage of Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond. I would let these writers transport me to another time and another place, if only for a few hours a day.
Not much has changed, as I still have shelves and boxes full of books I have read, some more than once, and some I have never read, but books are hard to let go of sometimes, especially when you feel a fondness for them, like I do. I cannot pass a bookstore, new or used, without stopping in to see what I can find and the book section at local thrift shops will find me drawn in while I peruse the shelves looking for the next fascinating topic.
Within the pages of books I learned so many things. How to read a map. The orientation of the sun. The direction of the wind. Signs of rain. How to instantly tell North from South and East from West. I never knew it at the time, but there were lessons for the writer I would eventually become. I started writing at the age of 12 and never stopped. On the page, I was never lost. On the page, I was all concentration and care. Words, I learned, could take me around the world in ways I would never quite grasp. Magazine1s would carry me to places I would never see in those pre-Internet days. I also learned the transforming power of words.
As a child, my parents did not know what to do with me. I rarely went anywhere without a book. I kept books under my pillow and under my mattress. I kept books in the bathroom under the sink so I could sneak in a few pages whenever and wherever possible. I read until I had to turn off the lights, and then I read by flashlight or streetlight or any other light that let me distinguish one letter from another. I took books with me when we traveled from place to place. Every spare dollar I had went to books or writing supplies.
I may never become the next Hemingway, Poe or Twain, but I hold on to the dream every time I pick up my pen or, in reality, sit down at my computer and begin to write. First one sentence, then another, until things form a more cohesive whole. In a box somewhere are the college yearbooks I wrote articles for as I began to get my feet wet in the world of professional writing.
There was a time when I wondered what my parents thought of my writing. My father has always been the quiet type, like I am, so rarely mentions it. On the other hand, my mother, rest her soul, was very proud of what I wrote. She kept a folder filled with clippings of every news article I ever wrote for the newspapers I worked at over the years as I moved from state to state. Unfortunately, she never lived to see me realize my dream of owning my own newspaper or launch this blog, as cancer took her away from the world all too soon.
I write about the truest things I know. Some times I write about mortality and grief, the body and illness, violence and history, sexuality and desire, transformation and hope, politics and humanity. I wonder how my parents, more so than my siblings, would think of the permission I give myself to say or do the things I do every day as a writer.
What is rewritten, what is soothed, what is redressed by me being invited where I never thought I would be welcomed through the written word? How many novelists and famous newspaper people were often shunned throughout their lives because they dared stray from the accepted norms of their times and the boundaries set by the society in which they lived? Dickens spent time in a debtor's prison. Shakespeare's authorship is still questioned to this day. Poe died penniless. Hawthorne died a virtual unknown, declared a heretic by the society in which he lived. Thoreau bought copies of his own book because he could not sell what he wrote. Samuel Clemens wrote under a pen name because no one believed he could write. Hemingway received five rejection letters before he sold his first manuscript.
I thoroughly believe art is a relationship you build with others. Writing, which is a type of art, is wonder in the same way traveling is wonder. I remember traveling across the country from the Washington, D.C. suburb I grew up in to California to visit my grandparents. In those days, the world and the universe seemed vast and unattainable. We parked one night in a rest area by the side of the highway. I watched the night come, watched the stars emerge the way they do in rural areas far removed from city lights and you can sometimes see from horizon to horizon like in parts of New Mexico and West Texas. The sky is so immense it feels as if the earth will give way. You realize how insignificant humans are and how small we actually are in the grand scheme of things.
I do not think I ever fell asleep that night. For hours and hours I drank in the stars, the wispy purple clouds, the lights of small towns at night and the wind. More than 700 miles of night sky and road. I have seen many beautiful things and places during my lifetime, but that memory still fills me with wonder.
That is what writing feels like to me at its very best - movement without time, drinking in starlight, alone and not alone. It was on that trip that I began to realize the power of ideas and thoughts and words.
Where exactly do we start with the story of writing? We have to start in the place before words. A place that is filled with the rushing of wind. It is the combination of these factors that has made me the writer I am today. Growing up in the shadow of the United States Capitol, living in small towns, the wind on my face, the sunshine on my cheek, the birds singing in the trees, the sunset over the mountains, the rustle of leaves in the fall, the crunching of fresh snow, the open roads and the vast reaches of stars in the Milky Way and the Northern Lights overhead.
The road lives in me. I am the child of skilled hands and the grandchild of manual laborers who pulled themselves through the Great Depression to earn a living on the hardscrabble dirt farms of upstate New York and the cotton fields of West Texas. I am the child and creator of border stories, folklore, tales of New England and far-flung places and past centuries. The writer shaped, haunted and beguiled by this great land called America. I learned language and rhythms in these places - endlessly rolling, sometimes slowing, sometimes disappearing, sometimes labored, sometimes effortless. This is where I learned to breathe, to shape words and to become all of who I am, and I cannot resist who I am. This is what writing taught me. And this is what writing still teaches me.
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