When I think about how I began cultivating my writer’s life, I realize had been doing so even before I knew what I was doing. But once it began a more conscious process, about a year later, I became overwhelmed. I didn’t know writers’ jargon or the prerequisites for developing into an accomplished writer. I didn’t know the lay of the land and how to negotiate the impact on me of those involved in the field. I didn’t know if I had the stamina or the talent necessary or how to inoculate myself against others’ judgments and snubs. All I had was the knowledge that I wanted to write, poetry in particular. I was 27, had two young children, and felt writing poetry was going to make my life come true.

What I know today, 34 years later, is that anyone can begin anytime under any circumstances and yes, writing can make your life come true. I also know that everyone creating a writing life takes different steps of different lengths at different times and even in different directions. There is no one right way to build this life, but each one of those steps, no matter how big or how small, is a step in the “write” direction.

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When my daughter was two and my son only a few months old, I took a break from working outside of the home. I was busier than I’d ever been in my life tending all day to two children two years apart. Between laundry and nursing and getting them both down for naps (never at the same time, it seemed) and making baby food and finding activities to share with my little girl because I didn’t want her to feel ignored, I wasn’t thinking about much else, even about missing adult company. Then one day, my best friend from college days asked me if I’d like to join her and three others who were buying tickets to a film series at the Seattle Art Museum. She really had to urge me to go and commented that I wasn’t the person she had befriended in college, always eager to discuss literature and plays.

I decided I could do this. It meant one evening a month out and pumping milk for a bottle-feeding. It meant getting comfortable with my non-mommy self again. No babies, just me with peers interested in the arts.

The brother of one of our group members had taken up astrology and wanted to do all of our charts. I sent him the birth information he needed. On an afternoon when I had childcare, I visited him to discuss the chart he had drawn.

 “Have you ever thought about writing?” he asked.

“Well, yes. In high school I wrote poems. Doesn’t everyone? In college, I decided to study literature. I loved the poets I read, the poetry books that seemed to jump into my hands when I was in bookstores.”

“Well, writing is burning a hole in your chart. You are a writer,” he replied.

Instead of questioning how he could know that or if it were true, between folding diapers (no disposables then) and pureeing carrots and apples, I began jotting down poetic phrases that came to mind. And I began reading what I was jotting down to my daughter who always had something of her own to add: “Mommy, in my dream you had an umbrella that carried you up with the raindrops and you fell back down to earth watering the flowers.” “Mommy, when I grow up and you grow down…” “Mommy, what can I draw for you? A sky with rainbows?” I enjoyed putting the phrases that struck me on paper. Writing was beginning to carve a space for itself inside my life.

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Think about the people in your life who encouraged your creative life. Did they say how much they enjoyed your letters and email? Did they think your ideas or life lent themselves to a book? Did they send you books to read or bring you to lectures and events they thought you’d like because they thought of you as a writer? Did they read some poems or stories you wrote and encourage you? What characteristics did they notice about you?

Write down what they said to you about your writing. Remember the moment? If you are stuck or worried about your progress, believe what they said and believe that writing is burning a hole in your chart.

What are you going to do today to feed the fire?

• Write a letter to one of those people who thought of you as a writer or make up a letter they might have sent you. Try starting with a line about what they are always telling you about yourself as a writer and then tell them what you plan to do to build your writing life this day or week or month.
• Pick up a book you have that you have meant to or are now reading. After you read one to three pages, write about something in your life that corresponds to what you have just read. Or write a letter to the author about what you have inside you to say that their book is helping you find a way to say.
• Go to a bookstore or library to find some new material that inspires you. Open the book to any page. Write down a passage that pleases you. Read it several times during the day. Then take a snippet from the passage and write your own passage inspired by what the phrase means to you.
• Make a plan to attend a literary reading at a local bookstore, arts foundation or college or listen to a poet or writer on the Internet (American Academy of Poets, The Writer’s Almanac, the Poetry Foundation, CSU Fiction Writers Read Their Work, and The University of Arizona Poetry Center are all sites with videos of poets and writers reading from their work. You might search YouTube.com as well.)

It might help to believe that you had a guy do your chart and he told you that you had to have writing in your life. And since you know you do, you believe him when he says to become a writer. You believe him because today and everyday you take action toward your commitment to and interest in writing. You fit something meaningful about writing into your day and enjoy it. Let your writer self be with you; don’t despair as you stir the batter of you life. Write down phrases you find in there.

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During those diaper-folding and food-pureeing months, I began a habit of writing and reading purposefully, both of which I treasured doing. This is what I had on hand: some poem starts, the University of Washington’s “experimental college” that offered low cost classes, and a husband who could watch the kids two early evenings a week during the long light of summer. I joined the poetry writing workshop I found offered by Michael McGee, a published, newly graduated MA in Creative Writing, who had studied with the poet David Wagoner at the University of Washington. We met on the lawn under a tree near 15th Avenue at the edge of the school’s grounds. Michael gave us assignments and we came back the next week with the poems we had written. I had never enjoyed myself more anywhere. Listening, writing, reading my own continuing attempts.

During that summer, I also went to the admissions office at the University of Washington to learn how I might study with David Wagoner. What I learned was thrilling–as a credentialed public school teacher, I could enroll in the University as a non-matriculating student and take one class at a time if I wanted. Next, I found out that prospective students of David Wagoner’s had to submit samples of their writing for him to review.

I needed moral support for that venture. A friend and I strolled our babies in their umbrella strollers past the many trim coeds to Padelford Hall, where I dropped off my packet of beginnings, feeling shy and even guilty to be attempting a class that might label me a poet, a writer, not only a mom and a teacher. Who was I to seek such a role in life? I had no idea, but I knew I loved those evenings under the big tree on the lawn at the university looking at poems and talking about how to develop them. I wanted to learn to write them. I wanted to publish one.

It wasn’t long before I heard that David Wagoner had accepted me and I could enroll in his class. I had no idea what he saw in the attempts I’d made that summer, but I was going to meet with a class led by David Wagoner (whose poems I had begun reading) two times a week!

And that is where my writing life took what I considered another giant step. All fall I read as much poetry as I could, and I listened to everything everyone had to say about every poem by a class member that came up in workshop. I listened especially hard to David Wagoner’s words–be they gentle or harsh. I learned that my reading tastes didn’ t match David Wagoner’s: he asked each student to take a turn starting off class by reading a poem they admired. I brought in a poem from Erica Jong’s book, Half-Lives, which he criticized. I read what he recommended and what I still liked despite his dislike. I learned that the revision I did on a workshopped poem pleased him more than it pleased my peers. I learned that it didn’t matter if the stars among the class didn’t particularly care about my response to their work. They were teaching me plenty and by comparing what they were saying with what David Wagoner was saying, I was learning at warp speed.

And I made a friend. The class was a mix of undergraduates and graduate students, newcomers to poetry writing and those who had studied with other poets before entering David Wagoner’s class because they wanted to be sure to impress him with their ability and publishing record. Paula Jones was one of David Wagoner’s protégés. He’d already published some of her work in the literary journal he edited, Poetry Northwest. He cared about what she said. And Paula Jones asked me if I wanted to spend a day with her writing! We would take one of the ferries from downtown Seattle to Bainbridge Island and back and write in our notebooks. We’d read what we wrote and talk about it.

I had never done this outside of class. She taught me a lot about how to respond to another’s writing directly but with kindness, with a real caring for what the poem could eventually accomplish if the poet wasn’t squelched by other’s pejorative statements. We talked about the ways of the class and the ways we might do things if we were in charge.

So now, there was one person in the class and then two, Nancy Reikow, a mom like me, who I could share my work with and my feelings about how grueling it could be sometimes in class. And I could read their poems and learn about the larger network in their writing lives–workshops they attended outside of the University, reading series they went to and participated in, information about the places they sent their work out to for publication, poets they admired and read when they were writing, and the literary journals they thought were worthwhile. I no longer felt like I knew nothing. I didn’t know a lot, but I realized I had found a way to learn more and more, a way to “catch up” with those who had been in the game longer than me.

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For those of us who write or long to, our lives are not the same without commitment to writing and the writing life. We write to express and nurture our understanding of our lives, our intimacy with others and to honor our humanity — our sense that loving ourselves, our human condition, nature and the others in our world is important. The writing life you are building fosters all of this and brings not only more knowledge, but an increasing feeling of stability in this chosen vocation or avocation.

What do you have on hand for extending your writing life right now?

• Can you enroll in a class at a nearby college or university, community or literary arts foundation, or online?
• Can you join a writing group in your community or on line or create one by emailing with others you know who write and may be scattered across communities?
• Can you read about local writers and read work in local publications?
• Can you continue to attend readings regularly, alone or with new writing friends?
• Can you find a writing chat room or blogging site that interests you? OpenSalon.com is an active site with well done writing. Brevity’s Creative Nonfiction blog is also of interest for nonfiction writing.
• Can you arrange writing days or café time or email exchanges with some of the writers you are meeting–you can divide the time between doing writing, sharing writing, and supporting one another with writing information?

Once you dive in, keep track of days you feel like you are an outsider and days you learn something that allows you to feel more connected, more sure footed in your writing world. What makes the difference? Once you know what that is–learning about a body of work, an organization, what language writers use to articulate their responses to work in progress, jargon that goes along with particular genres, the names of publications others in your genre are reading, the history of groups of writers, something pleasing about your own writing– you can concentrate on learning what you need to learn without worrying that feeling badly about your position as a new-be. Keep a list of the things that have helped you. Write them down for someone else (sharing what you know is the best way of connecting to learn more from others).

All the ways you study and practice writing in whatever mixture of venues, you are following your path and further negotiating the lay of the land you want to explore.