In classes and at writers’ workshops, people often want to know how they can make their lives writing lives. Many ask how they can begin to earn income from writing. The answers to both questions vary, depending on what kind of writing they want to create, whether they want to write for print publications or online sites, and what their past and current experience is with writing and other employment and passions. Although I can’t always answer the questions, I hope that by sharing my story, I can inspire others to look into their lives and recognize the components they already have for building writing lives.

Some Clues
A third grader, I sat at my small desk in Union, NJ, and faced my first decision as a writer when I began a Chanukah play my teacher asked me to write. I had named my main character Mary. I raised my pencil point from the page thinking that as much as I liked the name, it probably wasn’t the right one for a young Jewish girl in the 1950s. Soon, I’d ask permission to write my social studies reports as ballads.

You might think that I kept on writing and identifying myself as a writer, but by the time I reached high school, although many thought I’d be writing for the school newspaper or the yearbook, I wasn’t. Maybe it was because I was intimidated by the kids involved in those publications; they were smoking, wearing bohemian berets and busing to Greenwich Village on the weekends. I was on the drill team until I got a job at a local ice cream shop.

When I started at the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 1966, my first thought about a major was biology. Since the launch of Sputnik, turning out more scientists had been heralded as the solution to America’s one down status in space flight. After ruining what felt like a million frog embryos that I just could not for the life of me cut a cell off of with a baby hair under the dissecting scope, I gave up and declared myself an English major, no matter how disappointing that might be to my nation. I signed up for American lit classes that covered Hawthorne and Melville, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams and English lit classes that introduced me to the poetry of John Donne and Thomas Merton. Whenever I went to the University’s bookstore, poetry books seemed to fall into my hands, and I loved reading as many of the poems as I could standing in the aisles (this was before bookstores thought to provide chairs for customers). I needed electives outside my major and psychology and child development appealed to me. I couldn’t figure out why, though, when poems used as epigraphs for the texts’ chapters explained everything so concisely, we had to have the rest of the chapters to study.

After graduation, I began my career as a 7th grade reading and English teacher in Matawan, NJ, as part of the NJ Teacher Corps modeled on the national Teacher Corp program. Nights and weekends, I was studying for a Masters in Teaching degree with people who had “person-centered” education in mind, something educational administrations didn’t encourage at that time. But by now, having lived in Madison, WI during the famous Dow and anti-war demonstrations, I had much more confidence in speaking up, beret or no.

After two years of getting away with innovative teaching ideas, including  teaching Simon and Garfunkel songs (I was tickled this year when Simon published the lyrics for his song, “Rewrite”, as a poem in the New Yorker magazine), I moved to Seattle, which was still in its Boeing depression days. School districts were laying teachers off, making no new hires. With my child development background, though, I got a job directing a non-profit daycare center. While I was there, the writing bug came back. I wrote an article about training parent helpers for the daycare classroom. I was published in a social work journal. It felt good.

Then I had children, and as I tended to their needs, lines of poetry once again came to me, but I felt I’d lost my ability with words after two babies two years apart, diapers, interrupted sleep, and continually diverted attention. Then one day, my three-year-old daughter told me she had a dream in which I was in the clouds but held an umbrella and fell back down to earth watering the flowers. Her lyric sense about me propelled my desire to take writing poetry seriously. I scratched out what verse I could during naptimes and enrolled in a summertime course in poetry writing taught by a recent masters degree candidate. He quoted his professor David Wagoner and talked about the literary journal David Wagoner edited, Poetry Northwest. I realized I’d read a poem by David Wagoner in a text I used with my 7th graders back in NJ: Some Haystacks Don’t Even Have Any Needle.

Allowing Myself to Be a Writer
Soon, with a close friend for support, I walked onto the University of Washington campus to seek acceptance into David Wagoner’s poetry writing workshop as a non-matriculating student. Much to my surprise, based on the few pieces I’d scratched out during my babies’ nap times, David Wagoner accepted me into his mixed level poetry-writing workshop. That fall, I was attending classes and working part-time as a parent education instructor and daycare teacher trainer for Renton Vocational Technical College. I wrote whenever I could, often in my car between visits to daycare centers and, of course, during the kids’ naptimes.

Professionally, I wrote curriculum guides and grants for the daycare centers, but writing poetry was where I felt alive. I wrote about my kids, my upbringing and my struggles to make my life feel true to me. I had the goal of publishing one poem. After David Wagoner’s class, I studied with Nelson Bentley, who let the class know about a Colorado publication, Writers’ Forum, that was seeking poems. I submitted and saw my first poem accepted.

One Thing Leads to Another Thing
Now publishing that poem wasn’t enough. I longed to move from non-matriculating student status to graduate student in creative writing. But I had a graduate degree already; how could I rationalize paying for another one? And by now, like many in my generation of those who married young, I was getting a divorce and needed to make more money. Well, poetry called to me in a way that nothing other than having my children had. And so I applied and began the degree work with a student loan, studying with more fine poets: William Matthews, Richard Blessing, Steven Dunn, and Colleen McElroy, among them. During that time, the boyfriend of a friend from my classes wanted to start a press, and he decided to produce a chapbook of my poems. I was thrilled. My father bought many copies as gifts. The friend who’d walked me to the admissions office bought a set for her high school classroom. And even more wonderful, the chapbook brought me a husband — the man I have been married to now for 24 years found me through that book, which was sitting on the coffee table at the house of another friend who was his neighbor. Kurt read the poems while she was on the phone and asked to meet me.

Proud of me though he was, my father wanted to know what I was “going to do” with my continuing education, and writing poetry was not the right answer. But I reminded him that I was a teacher and I would teach to earn money and that with a Masters in Creative Writing, I could get jobs at community colleges — and that is what I did, teaching Freshman English for the most part. To make ends meet, I had to teach at several colleges and a high school all in the same term, and I also taught poetry writing at community centers, senior programs, and in my living room. Phil Tobin, cofounder of Simply Desserts in Seattle, asked me to tutor him in writing poetry, and for pay, he brought my kids and me beautiful pastries in pink bakery boxes each tutoring night and baked the kids birthday cakes each year as payment. In my living room, I taught adults, children, and even a parent-child class I designed.

In the years following my marriage, I had teaching gigs in elementary and high schools and with organizations like Seattle Children’s Theater. At a gathering at Seattle Pacific University for school librarians and writers-in-the schools candidates, I met young adult author Christi Killien. At adjacent tables, hers piled high with her many hard cover published editions and mine with my homemade Xeroxed classroom poetry anthologies, we talked the afternoon away and soon began writing letters to one another about our creative process. The letters were short personal essays. I remembered that David Wagoner had told the class that when you are a poet, you must also find another genre to write in because there are times poems will not come. For the time being, I was writing in both genres and enjoying myself.

After awhile, Christi and I decided that our letters could become a creative writing book and soon the same friend who ordered my chapbook for her classroom, invited me to dinner with a friend of hers who was leaving to become a publishing intern with Warner in NY. When our book was finished in our eyes, I sent him the manuscript. The editor he worked with liked it but wanted exercises at the end of each chapter. We added to the manuscript and Writing in a Convertible with the Top Down, got us an agent and a contract. Though it was never reprinted by Warner, a Portland Press, Blue Heron Publishing, brought out a new edition called Writing in a New Convertible with the Top Down once Christi and I added more letters. Blue Heron is defunct now, but the book has been printed by Booktrope.com in Seattle, a site that offers the book free as a pdf to read on line and to purchase as a print edition.

With my person-centered education studies and experience, my training with poets, and my experience writing to Christi, I had found my own way to teach reluctant writers, in and out of school, to write well. I received grant money to put out an anthology of essays from students as well as from faculty at community colleges. One of my favorite memories is of Kurt reading the essays I’d selected for the anthology, his tears and laughter as he read.

Soon he suggested that if I worked for the computer networking company he started, I would have more time to write, as I could take days off during the week. I stopped teaching at the colleges and high school then and wrote a second book on writing based on the teaching method I had developed. When my agent met editor Jack Heffron, then at Writers’ Digest Books, she made the sale for Writing the Personal Essay: How to Shape Your Life Experience for the Page. I felt that that might be the last book I had in me and I was destined to look for an office job downtown. But that wasn’t the case, and years after I’d written more writing books and that edition went out of print, Robert Goodman of Silver Threads publishing in San Diego published it again in revised and updated form with the title Writing and Publishing Personal Essays. This fall, he released an updated second edition.

Over the years, much happened. Phil Tobin and I hosted a reading series at his pastry shop and soon he approached me about co-founding a poetry book series called The Poem and the World, a project that went for four volumes publishing poetry from Seattle and her sister cities around the world. I spent a year as a guest writer-in-residence at Seattle University, and applied for and received the opportunity to be a writing resident at Centrum Foundation for month. I was faculty advisor to Spindrift, Shoreline Community College’s literary magazine, for a few years. I adapted children’s stories for plays at Northwest Children’s Theater on Mercer Island. I was Metro’s first curator for their King County poetry on the buses project. When Kurt joined a company in Los Angeles, I taught in the English department at Loyola Marymount University in LA, sometimes lucky enough to teach poetry or fiction courses. I edited a trade paperback, The Writer’s Journal: Forty Writers and Their Journals, for Delta Publishing and did three more books for Writer’s Digest Books (A Year in the Life: Journaling for Self-Discovery, Keeping a Journal You Love, and Writing Personal Poetry). Taking on a new job, I coached, tutored and edited for applicants to professional graduate degree programs in business, medicine and law. For a while, I also wrote a poetry column for Writer’s Digest magazine and in a few years, a book came from my application essay coaching experience: Perfect Phrases for College Application essays. I was earning money from my writing life!

When Writing is the Most Important Thing in the World
And then tragedy struck: my 25-year-old son died in a snowboarding accident at the end of December 2000. All the wind was taken from my sails. I didn’t do anything but read about loss and the work of shamans for six months. I went back to work when I could focus on others again, and I kept on writing and writing about Seth, my life with him and my life without him. One of the most healing things one can do after a gigantic loss is find a way to connect with others on a meaningful scale and it was two years after my son’s death that I found that way — one night Kurt and I were watching a program about a woman who ran a very successful Internet site. She was business manager, tech staff and talent.

I turned to Kurt and said, “Do you think I could run a web site for writers? Deliver my instruction on line?” It was as if he was thinking the same thing. “Of course.” He got to work the next day as liaison between my ideas and desires for the site and the programmer and designer he knew.

On what would have been my son’s 27th birthday, Kurt and I launched Writing It Real in honor of Seth, who had once told me during his college years that he and a hiking buddy had decided one day over goat cheese and a baguette that in life you didn’t need a lot, as long as you had the right stuff and the right food. Writing It Real was conceived as a subscriber-based magazine for those who write from personal experience and my mission was to help people find the right food and the right stuff for their writing because “Taking time to write from personal experience provides the right food and the right stuff for finding what lights our souls and what we have to offer others.”

Continuing
Having reached my goal of publishing a poem and so much more, I saw my mission as one of bringing to any writer the nurturing and enriched writing environment I was lucky enough to have from my graduate school days and beyond. I have written or edited contributed articles once a week now for nearing nine years. Kurt is website administrator, and he has become my favorite editor.

Since I’ve been back in the NW, I’ve also written prompts and other content for LifeJournal for Writers PC journaling software. In September of 2009, I saw the work I’d written about mourning Seth, which I worked on for seven years, published as a prose memoir, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief. I use proceeds from the sale of this book to benefit the PTMSC’s Seth Bender Memorial Summer Camp Scholarships fund.

In December, McGraw-Hill published my newest book, Creative Writing Demystified. My attempt in the book is not to demystify creativity and the spark we feel as writers; it is to explain the genres in a way I wish someone had explained to me way back in high school when I was intimated by the beret-wearing crowd who seemed to know things about writing that I didn’t. I could never have written this book before now, for many reasons. One is the amount of experience I have had drafting, revising, and drafting again and teaching others to write; a second is the amount of experience I have had with editors helping me tighten and shape my work to make its best contact with readers, and a third is the network of fine writers I know, who contributed to the book when I called on them to offer expertise and wisdom for writers wanting to understand creative writing genres.

Advice
Each day brings new opportunity that I didn’t dream of when I longed to reach my first goal of publishing a poem. I think the trick is always to feel that, like in a farm family that uses every part of a slaughtered pig, even the bristles that make good brushes, nothing is wasted.

Find a way to consider whatever you do as feeding your writing. When you bring all that you are and all that you have been to bear on the current moment, your writing excels and your niche in the writing world grows more clear. Honor the opportunities that come to write, in your field or for organizations, network with writers, attend classes, create writing groups, initiate or join projects centered in the writing arts; milk your experience with editors and other writers for the skills you need to sharpen in your writing and for introducing you to the people and projects you need to know about.

Figure out what your gift is and how to best deliver it. Put yourself and your name out there. Don’t bemoan your day job: You’ll probably find that there are contacts you have because of it and niches you can fill with your writing ability. And it can offer you settings and characters and events and feelings to write about.

Yes, it becomes a trick to balance the whole thing: time to write, time to live and be with others, time to extend your network, time to work for a living and time to develop your writing. But if you are clear about your goals, whether they be to publish poems and stories or write books, it all somehow becomes one writing life.

Whatever You Earn, You’ll Feel Rich
This year I was asked to write to writers in response to the phrase, “If you want to get rich, do something else.” Here’s some of what that assignment for Writer’s Digest magazine inspired for me:
In my opinion, I was poor when I wasn’t writing, when I didn’t trust the value of taking time to put my heart and mind on paper, when I thought that since I wasn’t already published, my desire to write was dilettantish. It wasn’t until I started taking writing classes that I began to grow out of the poverty of not trusting myself as a writer. In those early classes, I recognized that I felt better days I wrote than days I didn’t write, that my classmates’ writing and discussions about writing enriched my world.

Thirty years later, I am a wealthy person by many accounts: My writing has helped me understand those I love and myself, sustained me through the tragedy of losing my son and allowed me to write him and my late father back to life–I can see, hear, and feel them. More than I ever believed possible, I have reached the hearts and minds of others through my writing, whether I am well paid for that or not.

Recently, my 8-year-old grandson, who had attended a reading from my memoir and purchased a copy to be first on the book-signing line, interrupted our family’s adult dinner conversation about health care reform a few weeks later. “Grandma,” he said, smiling at me, “your book is good.” How could I feel any richer?