We benefit from writing about how something important to us became a passion. Reliving the decisions leading up to reshaping our lives around our passions and reflecting on how our efforts changed us, we learn more about our journeys.  When we read accounts of others following their dreams, we experience the exhilaration of overcoming obstacles and identify.

Long before I knew about Rainier Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” and its famous ending, “… for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life,” I followed my dream of writing poetry and it altered my life. My process of changing my life started when I became a parent, and it escalated five years later after I wrote a poem about a nighttime dream that I took to heart.

I hope my essay inspires you to write about making your significant life changes.

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Near the Light
By Sheila Bender

I looked into my daughter’s eyes a few days after we were home from her birth in the hospital and said,   “Emily, who are you?”  Hearing myself ask that question, I imagined her corresponding question, “Mom, who are you?” Sadly, I realized I’d have to answer, “I am a woman trying to live in the world as if what stirred my heart was beside the point. I am a woman trying to live in the world as if the complexities novels and poetry address are only so much brightly colored rubbish, and only the rational, sanitized ideal person of 1950’s America makes sense.”

The world I had grown up in was proclaimed safe for democracy, though the Cold War was needed to protect that safety.  It was celebrating its new safety from polio.  Households could be as germ-free as hospitals, milk was fortified with vitamins and water was fluoridated. We were the most privileged and educated of US generations.

It was the mid-60’s by the time I got to college, and even though once there I’d demonstrated with fellow students against the war, canvassed neighborhoods with petitions to stop it, studied history and education with radical, passionate professors, and smoked a little dope, when I married, I did so according to the dictums I’d heard in childhood:  don’t rock the boat; do what’s best for your family; don’t pay attention to your feelings (they are “wrong” or “only feelings”).

 Holding my newborn daughter, I knew that being her mother, I would help her grow into her own life, independent of mine but nurtured by it. I felt it strongly, despite all my practice overriding my true feelings.   I would have to stop living beside the point. I appreciate to this day whatever mystery and force organized my skewed perceptions and said, “Begin to put this thing called life together for yourself.  There is no other way.  Go.”  I tried my hand at volunteering to be an advocate to children in the court system and I became educational director of a day care where I could impact the lives of pre-schoolers, but after my son was born, I started writing poems during my children’s nap times and recognized that poetry would be my path.  I remembered that as a grade schooler, I’d asked permission of my social studies teacher to write my reports in ballad form and as an adolescent, I’d tried my hand at writing poems but never joined the literary magazine group.  In college, I loved the poetry I studied (I had allowed myself those electives even though it wasn’t practical like educational policy studies or composition for teachers).  I’d introduced poetry to the seventh graders I taught before my daughter was born, and I recognized that whenever I went into a book store, a book of poems I had never heard of would find its way into my hands.

In 1978, I signed up for a free university summer class with a poet named Michael Magee, from whom I learned there were graduate degrees in writing poetry.  His class was a treat to myself, 28-years-old and the mother of a one-year-old and a three-year-old. Having struggled through my husband’s medical school training, internship, and residency, we were now living in a big house.  I was researching remodeling, but aside from paying attention to my children, I enjoyed nothing so much as going to my poetry writing class and making efforts toward writing poems. I didn’t want to stop working on poetry after that summer class ended. Because certified teachers could enroll in the University of Washington as non-matriculating students, I signed up for an undergraduate poetry writing class with David Wagoner, whose name I recognized from a poem in the anthology I’d used with my seventh graders. The University of Washington class turned out to be a kind of trial-by-fire. I had been accepted into it on the basis of some beginning efforts I’d submitted, only to find that everyone else had studied writing poetry for at least a year or more before coming to study with Wagoner, editor of Poetry Northwest, a prestigious literary journal.  I felt invisible in that class; my responses didn’t matter since no one in class knew what Wagoner thought of me.  And few people in the class knew me, so they felt free to dissect my unpolished beginnings thinking they could impress David Wagoner. Their criticisms were at times brutal, but I survived and persisted because I loved the effort of working on a poem, the effort of looking into a piece of writing, mine or someone else’s, and seeing where it could grow.  Revision seemed like gardening, knowing where to prune so more growth could happen, when to cut something back to the ground, when to cut off blossoms so others would bloom. I listened carefully to what was being said and learned a language for discussing poems.

Workshop protocol required the student whose poem was up for discussion read it aloud to the class whose members all had copies and then remain silent while David Wagoner called upon class members to respond to the work. In class, David Wagoner called us all by our last names preceded by a Mr. or Ms., all of us except for Richard. If no one raised his or her hand to begin the discussion, Wagoner would say, “And Richard speaks.”  Richard would then go on to elaborate his criticism of each student’s effort.  He would say things like, “I don’t mean this in the pejorative sense,” and “in the penultimate stanza.”  These words intimidated me, of course.  But I looked them up in the dictionary and felt I could, underneath the sting, understand Richard’s comments.  When my poem came up for discussion, I listened to his words with composure as if it weren’t my work but someone else’s he was talking about. I took what was said to heart or to ear–if it didn’t sound right to my classmates, it probably wasn’t written well, but maybe not for the same reasons they were providing.

I revised.  My revision came up for response.  I read it aloud in class.  There was silence in the room.  David Wagoner said, “And Richard speaks,” and Richard described what he saw as my poem’s annoying weaknesses.  I listened to what he said wondering if I agreed.  No one else spoke, so David Wagoner began, “I think this is a very good revision.”  Stunned as I was, I didn’t hear the rest of what he said. But soon after that day, I learned that Richard’s last name was actually Speakes.  Laughing to myself, I hoped some day a distinguished poet would say before a group, “And Sheila Bender… .”  In addition to writing my own poems, I knew I wanted to help others write theirs.

At the end of the term, David Wagoner required us to put our poems together in an order with a title as if to form a chapbook.  A chapbook is a short, paperback collection often stapled instead of bound or stitched.  The term derives, I’ve been told, from a time shortly after the printing presses in England were producing pamphlets. Men in big overcoats with pockets on the inside to hold books walked the streets of London calling, “Cheap books, cheap books for sale!”   I used one of the poems I wrote as a consequence of living in the house that was being remodeled as the title poem of my proposed chapbook collection:

Near the Light

It is snowing suns again.
They land on the cracks and rough plaster
where you are trapped in dreams
that keep coming true.

Once you were flying,
swimming in the air, and they
yelled from the ground reminding
you to close the cellar door.

You went back and every day
became another day to march to,
scout badges stitched to your sash,
the probability curve of merit.

Now you are the age
your mother was when mornings
she turned first to obituaries.
Nights you dream the full moon
explodes divorcing the sky
and they yell from the ground
something about homing pigeons,
but you fly gathering moon pieces,
all of them, without looking back.

Images from the house remodeling, which represented a not-to-be-interrupted upward mobility, from early flying dreams, from a heart destroying need to achieve, from the memory I’d forgotten of my mother reading the obituaries out loud before I left for school, from a dream I’d had about the moon exploding and the way I’d awakened inconsolable that the sky would not have its moon anymore found one home in the matrix of this poem.  The writing told me I was going somewhere new; I was going to fly away this time, and this would mean no more merit badges. I was not going to accept the reasoning I’d grown up with. I was going to reassemble the moon.

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Writing about launching a meaningful, life-changing course of action is a good topic for an essay.  However, the subject easily leads to abstraction and summarizing rather than creating lived experience on the page.  Here are some tips to help you avoid this:

Pinpoint the moment you knew something had to change. Where were you, what were you doing, who was there with you, what were you thinking and what were you saying to yourself or others? Introducing the audience for your thoughts and words and describing how you spoke or thought in the presence of that audience will give the reader details to envision.

Raise a question to someone and answer it, writing about what you did first when you knew the change was going to happen.

Then write about what your next actions entailed. Use anecdotes to evoke what that time was like. End by reporting what happened as a consequence of your course of action and let it circle back to the beginning.  In my essay, I introduce the 1950’s ideas that crushed my interests in literature and at the end I say I will re-assemble the moon, using symbol to address the problem I’d had–living beside the point.

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If you write an essay from this sample and want to develop it further, please send it in.  Perhaps we can use it to work together on a revision diary article.