I am so happy to be posting two more letters to those who discouraged you as writers. I know we all resonate with these situations. And again, I hope to see more of these letters in my inbox by 1/25 for posting in next week’s Writing It Real.

Here are the two for this week:

Lizbeth Hartz’s “To Judge or Not to Judge—That’s Not the Question”

To All Who Respond to Work-In-Progress,

Some four months ago, a former journalist I’ll call K in my writers’ group of four women took a shot at me during our every-other-week-sharing-writing-via-phone meetings. Unlike her previous judgmental jabs, this one felt like a personal attack.

I’d chalked up K’s previous cutting comments to her inability to give feedback using “I” messages. She hadn’t learned to say “I felt worried here, or I was confused about this” but instead said, “you” did this or “you” did that. (I did try to tell her this, diplomatically, but she didn’t hear me.) Although her judgmental remarks were often unkind, I realized her criticism said much about her and little about me. I would go through a process of licking my wounds, realizing I don’t need to take it personally, and then asking myself if there was anything I could learn from her remarks that would help me. There usually was, so I continued our phone meetings.

The title of the last piece of mine that K “critiqued”—I prefer the term “giving feedback”— was Giving Care. I was the narrator talking about my experience helping to care for Lily, my husband Barry’s mom. Lily suffered from a particularly devastating form of Alzheimer’s known as Lewy Body, which causes the person afflicted with it to be combative, to kick and scratch. One night, when Lily fell and Barry lifted her dead weight of 140 pounds off the floor, she dug her talon-like nails into his arms and screamed, “Put me down, goddamn it!” He wouldn’t let me bandage his bloody wounds until she was safely back in her bed and asleep.

K’s remarks about Giving Care became the brick that broke the camel’s back. First, because she told me “the narrator” (me) was unreliable. Stunned by her rudeness and lack of understanding about caretaking, I was speechless. Then because she didn’t read carefully—she told me that this narrator was unreliable because “she” let Lily scratch her, and “she” put up with it. Actually, Barry was the one who Lily scratched.

It wasn’t the first time someone had implied I was nuts to live in that house with someone who, as Lily put it in her earlier years, had lost her marbles. In K’s case, I knew enough about her personal history to know she would never have been able to function as a caregiver. Some people just aren’t, and she was one of the ones I’ve met who are proud of not letting anyone lean on them. The way K saw it, I was letting myself be used a doormat.

That’s when I realized I was letting her suck my energy, taking me through spaces and places I didn’t need or want to go. I became too busy with my radio play class and doctors’ appointments (all fictional) to meet with K at our allotted times. My bowing out continued for several months. Finally, she reluctantly told me, because I’d canceled so many sessions—“I’m a numbers person,” she told me, “and you’ve missed 17 out of our last 25 appointments”— she suggested we cancel our Monday appointments until my radio play was done so she could fill them with other, more reliable, appointments.

I tried to keep the joy out of my voice when I said, “That’s a great idea.” How delighted I was to have her think that this was all her idea.

There’s a happy ending to this letter. Meeting with my two remaining writer friends, and taking classes with writers who know how to offer feedback that helps instead of hurts continues to be fun and empowering.

Whew for now,

Lizbeth

***

Sheila Cosgrove’s “Dear Miss Bludgeon”

Dear Miss Bludgeon,

I was around 16 years of age, and I have no memory of how old you might have been at that time. I didn’t know you, and you didn’t know me. I’d never had you as a class teacher. You had been assigned to monitor the exams we of that age were taking for the General Certificate of Education administered throughout all English high schools at that time. It was terrifying. Arranged in rows in the gym, because an ordinary classroom would not have been big enough, we all felt it was a do-or-die marker in those last years of High School.

Did you, Miss Bludgeon, have any idea how serious and nerve-wracking this sort of unusual event can be for a child, even one who is a teenager? No, I don’t think you could have. One of the items on the agenda was to write an essay about something you remembered from your childhood. I liked this assignment because it didn’t depend on rote memory of a bunch of facts, but just remembering something from my own real life! For some reason, I landed on a particular memory of mine that isn’t at all earth-shattering, but I hoped to convey why it still, even today, fascinates me.

I had been evacuated out of Liverpool during World War Two to live with a dear aunt of mine in Yorkshire, a place thought to be safe from the bombing. I was two years old at the time and was going to love the green fields, low stone walls, sheep, and trees of that lovely green countryside. But best of all was to be taken care of by my very dear and loving aunt. She was a happy soul and like to sing—especially Irish sings—as she swept the kitchen, peeled potatoes, or made tea. She gave me free rein to explore the house and the big outdoors when the weather was nice.

But what I came to love most was a window on the second floor that had a design of colored glass pieces. I discovered that the glass allowed me to see the garden and the house next door in different colors. I could make the world all red with the red glass: a pink sky, dark red trees, and scarlet bricks in the wall of this neighboring house. Or it could be a lemon sky, bronze leaves, and yellow bricks in the house. I changed the world out there depending on which colors I selected—blue, green, purple, and then the shock of clear glass as it had been to begin with. It felt like such power and excitement, each color creating a different feeling with it, too. It was fascinating. I don’t know if my aunt ever knew how much I loved this game, but she never interfered.

So this is what my essay was about. After the essays were collected up for some initial scrutiny by the monitoring staff, this is where you reappeared at my side, Miss Bludgeon, with a comment that shook me to the core. You hissed in my ear, “You just made this up, didn’t you?” and you slid the papers under my face. What? I must have looked up at you with shock and pain in my eyes. Of course, I could not say it—that it is what I remembered. I couldn’t understand what made you think I’d cheated. What was it that made you so angry!

You were finding fault not with my writing, but what the child in me liked to imagine and play with. Isn’t this very natural to a child, and very much a part of all good writing of fiction, poetry, essays, and plays, that it IS is a made thing expressed with imagination?

I’m glad I passed that exam in any case. And that I never had to see you again, Miss Bludgeon. But I hope you found the child in you that loves to dream and fantasize, and just relax into the fun of writing, painting, dancing, seeing the magic of color and light that gives life to all things, including you.

Yours,

Shelagh Cosgrove