Our fall/winter writing contest judge, Molly Tinsley, chose “Why I Write,” a personal essay by Mary Kurtz, as our first-place winner. Molly said in her notes about this essay: “Emotional control of the narrative makes Mary’s experience all the more riveting and poignant. I was swept up by the vivid flow of habitual action interrupted by intense bursts of scene. Splendid handling of an expanse of time — slipping back then advancing steadily. Loved the flash-forward. Narrative progress kept clear by orienting initially on that first home, then on The Desk, or whatever writing surface became The Desk.” At the essay’s end, we’ve included notes by Mary Kurtz that address her approach to writing and revision. Please leave a comment for Mary at the article’s end. She will appreciate hearing from her audience.

Why I Write
by Mary Kurtz

Sorting through a storage room recently, filled with all the lost and forgotten mementos, I found a small publication titled: Quiz and Fun Newspaper by Mary Bieber. Written on aged butcher-block paper with a number two pencil, its copyright date was January, 1961. On page four the reader could find the answer to the third riddle: What did the floor say to the wall? “I’ll meet you in the corner.” I’d forgotten about the little butcher-block rag I’d created at the kitchen table in my childhood home. But I remembered every inch of it when I held it my hands.

The first day I walked into that home, I wore a blue homemade calico dress and shiny patent leather shoes. My mother, siblings and I had picked up my father from our rental apartment on the way home from church: an angry atheist, he always got to stay home on Sunday morning. The six of us rode in silence in our ‘47 Buick to inspect the gray shingled home still under construction. At three, I found the step over the threshold half my height. But reaching for the doorframe, I carefully stepped up and pulled myself through the door.

My parents had hoped for this day for some time. Early in their married life they chose to live and work abroad in Santa Barbara, Chihuahua, Mexico where my father was employed by the American Smelting and Refining Company. Three of their four children would be born there. Their idealized experience of living abroad, however, brought challenges to them both: for my mother, motherhood away from her family, and for my father, the surfacing of his life-long struggle with major depression and addictions.

Each day after work he stopped by the ASRC Tecolotes Club and Bar for drinks, attempting to subdue haunting childhood memories, and what the family would come to know later, a life-long battle with his sexual identity. Five years after beginning a promising career as a mining engineer, he was referred by the company doctor for insulin shock therapy treatment in 1952. Many years later, my family would discover that my father had molested my brother’s young friend just before his depressive collapse. Traveling alone to and from El Paso, Texas, he never spoke to my mother about the deep roots of his depression nor allowed her to communicate with the doctors who cared for him. He only later described crying uncontrollably after each treatment session.

So, after seven years of the challenges they faced living abroad, my parents brought their children back to the United States in 1954 to attend public schools. Perhaps they, too, hoped a new beginning might ease my father’s mental illness. With the rise of the uranium boom, he was hired by the Climax Uranium Company. Both World War II veterans: my father, an Air Force Captain who served in North Africa and my mother, a WAC who served in the Pentagon, they were thrilled with the help of the G.I. Bill to purchase their very own home.

In our new dwelling, a family of six eventually eked out small places of incomplete comfort and safety. I shared bunk beds with my sister, Meg,games and laughter with my close brother, Michael, but felt distant from my oldest brother, Dutch, my mother’s unspoken favored child. On ,Friday nights, after traveling to mines in western Colorado and eastern Utah to purchase uranium  from independent producers, my father left his Geiger counter at the back door with his black steel-toed boots. With my father’s constant travels, my mother, an English teacher, stayed home to raise her children.

From an early age I searched for evidence that either my mother or father knew I was their small and quiet third child. Over time I gave up wishing my father would sweep me up into his lap just to sit a while. I never understood why my mother thought my “cringing” face in photographs was funny. Didn’t she know how hard it was to worry alone? The darker my father’s moods the more I disappeared into corners of our home.

At dinner, I imagined small threads of safety sitting next to my mother, furthest from my father’s reach. But when the tension increased and my mother’s eyes locked on a distant point across the kitchen, the safety slipped away. If he pulled his belt from his pants at dinner tonight, would she stand between my father and one of us? When he took one of my siblings away and my mother sat silent, my chest tightened, my eyes welled. By eight years old, the unarticulated thought that my mother couldn’t keep me safe began to hollow out my heart.

During the week though, when my father was gone, I created a world that made sense at my temporary desk in the kitchen: a butcher-block paper extra and my homework. The Formica table was a fitting place for second-grade penmanship exercises, a third-grade science project, and a fifth-grade grammar book. With each word I gathered pieces of myself and the world, and set them on the page. And when I turned in my assignments, I waited to hear teachers say, “Good job.” In that moment of recognition I was visible, I was known to another.

At twelve, I moved into a small room my father reluctantly notched out of a dark corner of the basement near the laundry room. Next to my single bed I placed the rocket transistor radio I received for Christmas atop a dynamite box my father salvaged from the uranium mines and painted bright red. In the early sixties, I listened, like all teens in western Colorado, to KOMA Radio from Oklahoma City. Against the wall under a basement window I organized my first real desk: a simple, easy-assembly-and- staining-required desk my mother put together and stained.

In junior high I struggled with reading between the lines and “new math.” At the same time, my father’s drinking and verbal abuse of my brother, Michael, intensified. Now a high school student, he increasingly challenged my father’s heavy-handed treatment. In targeting his second son, deflecting all that stirred inside him, he continued to crush Michael’s spirit. Seeking relief, I retreated each night to my room and wrestled with equations and Rudyard Kipling beneath a small desk lamp. I often practiced my flute and Gibson guitar, my spindly music stand holding sheet music for “If I Had a Hammer” and “This Land is Your Land.” Soothed by the solitary space, I found a solace I would return to again throughout my life.

By the time Michael graduated in 1966, my father had cycled again into deep depression. Shortly after my fifteenth birthday, in a desperate attempt to free himself of what he thought was the burden of his family, he took a position with the Gilsonite Mining Company in eastern Utah. Fully intending to live in the isolated community by himself, he informed my mother that now his sons had graduated, my sister and I were her responsibility. But my mother insisted on moving us with him. Sitting on our front lawn with my best friend I don’t remember how I told her I’d be moving. But I remember the sharp smell of the junipers, the cool of the August grass where we had played football and mumblety-peg, and the matching plaid shirts we once wore in sixth grade. I couldn’t imagine another world.

In the ‘40s white clapboard home, our new life in Bonanza, Utah began each day with the pop of a Coors, our alarm clock ringing out his despair. Living, not only with my father’s entrenched alcohol abuse but soon the addition of an adolescent foster son (the second foster boy my father had brought into the family), the divide widened between my father and my sister and me.

Wayne, a troubled young adolescent, was given my sister’s room. Relegated to a sparse basement corner, Meg’s memories of our company home remain cast in the dark gray light of that room. Although he stayed less than a year, my sister and I never understood why Wayne received experimental black paint for his “new” bedroom and all new school clothes. While Christmas card photos portray a consistent family life then, embedded in the layers of dark room solution was my mother’s irrational belief she could save her husband and the image of a happy family.

In my back bedroom, at my hollow door and cinderblock-desk, I filled the void writing letters to long-time childhood friends. I typed weekly essays on a manual typewriter for Mrs. Caldwell who expected perfection on the page, and a respect for formal language. She preferred the more refined sound of “everyone” to the coarser sounding “everybody.”

Then a day I often feared came one bitter winter afternoon, the winds robbing the desert of a meager snow. I walked into the house from the bus stop hoping my mother would beat me to the door from her day as a middle-school teacher. With a dread that accompanied me most days, I saw my father’s pick-up already parked in front of the house. In the center hallway outside my bedroom I discovered him in his winter work clothes and boots on the linoleum floor, bleeding and unconscious. I imagined him dead. A voice erupted in my head, “Where’s my mother? She’s never here when she’s supposed to be!”

I erased my memory of the next few hours. By entering a familiar altered consciousness of time and place, I left the scene. It was a well-rehearsed method I’d used often to escape an intolerable hopelessness, one that felt as though it would subsume me. No one ever talked about what happened that afternoon. As the winter evening closed in, my mother sat sequestered with my father in their narrow room, her sobs deep and bereft. The next day she admitted him to an alcohol rehabilitation unit in Grand Junction, Colorado. With the prickly opposition of an adolescent, my father expressed his unhappiness with the assisting psychiatrist and refused therapy.

After discovering him, I sat at my desk that night and wrote a letter to my older brothers who attended Tulane University in New Orleans. Typing as though undercover, I searched for validation of a world no one seemed to know existed: one that felt as though daily life were a gyroscope always in need of a spin to steady it. I wrote, “He’s not well. He’s not nice. He’s not the father I need.” They wrote back, “You’re right. We’re impressed with your insight.” From their response I knew I wasn’t alone and most of all, I knew I wasn’t crazy.

For then on I thought of the day I’d leave the desolate little mining town of Bonanza. Grappling to remain steady and resilient, I found a sense of hope each day at school. Each morning at seven-fifteen sharp, I stepped onto the school bus for the fifty-mile trip to school where I passed the time reading historical fiction and biography: the courage of Ari Ben Canaan and the crazed brilliance of Vincent Van Gogh. I happily studied my way through 750 vocabulary words, flash card by flash card, twenty each week. And often with the coming of spring, I’d scan the desert for some place of promise in the horizon, then rest in the warmth of the sun coming through the school bus window.

One late afternoon the spring of my senior year, I stepped into the house, the air thick, as though the day had landed heavily on our home. Ushered into my room, my mother said in a raw, flat chord, “Your father’s lost his job. They kept him as long as they could. We’re not sure what we’ll do.” After a rare hug she walked out. My mother’s stoicism, on one hand the source of her steadiness, was, on the other, chilling. I had watched her misplaced strength become a handmaiden to the addict, over and over again.

Standing in front of my full-length mirror, I remember the outfit I wore: a homemade wool jumper and blouse with a fashionable yellow-hued scarf. I felt pulled together, confident whenever I wore it. While I would have loved to have been consoled, I’d learned long ago to gather up the unraveling of my mind by myself. I looked at the careful tie of my scarf, felt the warmth of the wool of my jumper and curled up first at my desk and then in my bed.

When my time came, I left the shame of my father’s failures and mental illness for the University of Colorado. Fearing his darkness would one day become mine, I promised myself I’d do all I could not to repeat his life. Even though I struggled to befriend the rigor I found at my spare, dormitory desk, I dutifully finished assignments in German Literature and Political Science. As a sophomore I scooted up to a kitchen table in the middle of a tired 450 square foot basement apartment and consumed eight weeks of summer school biology. But freedom from my father’s despair was brief. One August evening, from the wooden kitchen table covered with a floral cotton cloth I wrote an old roommate a note, “My father was committed. I’m on my way home.”

My sister, living alone with our father in a remote mining community in Arizona while my mother was away in summer school, had found my father barricaded in a bathroom suffering from a psychotic break. After repeated threats to kill himself, she ran to the nearest neighbor for help, and within hours my brother and I were called home. The territory felt achingly familiar. In a quiet moment after my father’s hospital admission, I asked my mother why she stayed. “If I leave he may die in the streets.” My father would survive nine more years but die prematurely at fifty-nine of leukemia.,

I have returned faithfully to the harbor of a desk to weather what has felt like the contagious despair of his life even after his death. Having always searched for nuance and intent in movement, faces and words, I’m most at home making my life visible on the page. It’s there I can safely explore and translate the world I inherited: my father’s inability to face the truth of his life and the legacy of an arid emotional childhood, which, in its deep reach, led ultimately to the death of my brother, Michael, to suicide in 2007.

Now, fifty-two years later, I am grateful for the simple creative act of publishing a small butcher-block paper rag at the Formica-topped table and the requirements of my childhood homework. For in the doing, the discipline and the discovery, I found a place of safety in which I existed and could continue to heal, all through the transforming practice of studying and placing words on the page.

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Here are Mary’s reflections on her writing and revision process:

Notes for WIR Writing Contest

In preparing my essay for the recent Writing It Real Writing Contest, I set out to test the waters of memoir by writing about the impact of mental illness on my family. It was more difficult than I imagined. There were times the history was so uncomfortable it made it difficult to continue. But I did, and in the end it gave me a sense of completion and peace. However, I wouldn’t have gotten to my final submission without Sheila’s helpful suggestions for revision.

Showing the reader the impact of my father’s mental illness over time was a central challenge. In my first submission I struggled with showing the reader at the beginning of the essay the extent of my father’s early and severe struggle with depression. It felt as though I might be hitting them over the head with it. But with Sheila’s questions and responses, it became clear that I needed to introduce my father’s first depressive collapse early in the essay. Only then would the reader have a reference point for subsequent scenes of my father’s depressive moods and cyclical decompensations.

Sheila also helped me bring the reader into the story with details like adding an example of what was in the little newspaper and showing the reader more of how I, as a young girl, experienced my father and his dark moods. Her question about what happened after I found my father unconscious pushed me to dig deeper about my memories of that event. Consequently, I added the description of my dissociating, a common form of coping for individuals who experience trauma. Setting and expanding scenes like these and letting them speak for themselves was an important part of the revision.

Thank you both, Sheila and Molly, for recognizing my writing and story.

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And thank you, Mary, for taking advantage of the Writing it Real contest, which encourages rewrites before the final guest judge chooses the winners.