This is the day I turned 77. It is a good day for review and reflection.

I came to the writing life seriously when I began studying poetry as a non-matriculating student at the University of Washington near my home in Seattle. After a year, I was persuaded to enter the Master of Arts in Creative Writing program there to have access to more teachers and writing peers (although I didn’t at the time feel like a peer—I was 10 years out of a graduate program in teaching, had two preschool children demanding attention, and didn’t know if I could survive required courses like Critical Theory. But I entered the program when my advisor Richard Blessing said it would cement my relationships with other poets who would be my lifelong comrades in the art.

I graduated in 1982 with that MA in Creative Writing (the MFA was not available then at UW then) having studied with poets who taught me more than I could have imagined about the craft, about their own teachers and poetry and my own early writing and how to develop it. In the next twenty years, I applied what they taught me not only to my poetry but to teaching writing the way the poets had taught me—we write to save our lives they said, we write because we will feel sick if we don’t, they said, we write in layers because the whole poem doesn’t come in the right order or all at once or with the imagery and sculpting a draft will need.

When I received critiques of my drafts from classmates who loved being critical (pulling the drafts apart with negativity) and talking about what “wasn’t working” or “endings that weren’t earned,” I began translating their criticism into “I statements.” “I was confused here.” “I felt left out of the poem here.” “This phrase took me to a place that left me disoriented about where the speaker in the poem stood.” This made all the difference in how I felt about getting back to work.

In the years that followed as I taught at community colleges, universities, writer conferences and community centers, I taught my students to help classmates using “I statement” responses rather than critiquing each other’s work. I led a popular poetry reading series at a Seattle coffee house and curated and designed Seattle Metro’s first poetry on the buses program. I wrote several creative writing instructional books and in them, published my response system—let the writer know words and phrases that struck you, let them know the feelings their work engendered that seemed in service to the piece and what feelings were engendered that seemed to jar or distract from it. And finally, tell the writer where as readers they wanted to know more. All of this in “I statements” and without judgmental jargon.

As I wrote and published essays, poetry, and more instructional books, my husband’s career in computing was progressing. He figured out why networks ran poorly for organizations from newspapers to banks to hospitals, cat food manufacturers, and cruise lines. He could help me start an online instructional site. He began by interviewing me on what I wanted in my website. I saw it as a place to share ideas about the writing life and ways to remember and write life experiences, to enjoy the intimacy of reading personal experience, and most of all, a place to be inspired to write and move beyond lack of confidence. I could pass on what my teachers taught me and help others pass that on.

In October 2002 we launched Writing It Real, the name I found in one of the best synchronicities in my writing life—I was in a plane sitting next to a publicist from LA who told me her work was to make people famous. I smiled and told her what I did in my books and teaching and was now proposing to do online and, again with a smile, I asked if she could make me famous. She asked me a very basic question—how do you sum up your approach? Writing it real popped from my mouth.

The first version of our website was custom-designed by a programmer and graphic artist. There was no package-ready software to create a website. I posted an instructional article each week. In 2004, my husband and I moved from Los Angeles where we had lived for five years while he flourished during the internet boom. But then, its bubble burst as it had earlier in the Bay Area. We moved back to Washington State where we had a home in Port Townsend. He said, “There are enough computers now in Jefferson County for me to work there.” It would be a long commute to a college or university with openings for me. So, after a friend suggested that I teach online, I created email groups to serve as classrooms. Nicenet, Google Groups, Slack, Canvas and other online classroom and meeting programs weren’t there yet.

Twenty-three plus years later, the Writing It Real community includes many publishing members and that excites me. It is okay not to want to publish, but what I deem wonderful about publishing poems, stories, memoir short and long, and novels is two-fold: someone outside of our hearts and minds has found our work meaningful and is wanting to share it with an audience larger than we might be able to gather.

It is now prestigious to publish in online-only venues when earlier it was thought only print magazines and anthologies were ones in which we could be proud to have our writing appear. These literary magazines and anthologies flourish and proliferate.

Self-publishing and hybrid publishing (where the writer bears some of the cost of production) have both grown up during these decades. Even if we become our own publishers, we build community by involving others in the production process as we engage first readers and developmental editors whose notes to us are invaluable. They are part of our success and affirm our desire to get our work to more readers. Even if we dream of wanting those readers limited to our family members, it is the work involved that helps us evolve as writers who experience the gratification of seeing our experiences, reflections, and imaginations out there. This is worthy work and working with others, we become communities of worthy workers.

We offer and receive support in believing our personal experience and perceptions are worth writing. And in writing we learn more about that experience and how we think and feel. That writing community support helps us stay grounded in believing what is most human about us and our world. We understand the bittersweet nature of being alive and understand, as Keats did, that writing that succeeds holds what he called “negative capability.” One thing and its opposite. In writing about loss, we are also retrieving what or who was lost. If we are writing about today, it is against the backdrop of the days that have come before. If we are writing about joy, that writing acknowledges that there are more difficult emotions and so joy is cherished. If we write about difficult times and emotions, we are writing having survived and grown from them. Writing is a basic tool for staying alive to ourselves, our surroundings, and those we know and who we have yet to meet.

On this birthday, I feel more gratitude than I can express to those who have joined with me in reading the Writing It Real articles and attending the classes I offer. I feel gratitude for being able to practice a way of responding to work-in-progress that empowers writers to know where they might be travelling in the writing and how to get there. I feel gratitude to those who have continued to design and redesign and host my website as the years brought more possibilities to bear. I feel grateful for my writing that has and continues to help my heart remain open.

And now, back to today. 77 candles would be a lot to blow out. I know I could cheat with a big 7 and a big 0 candle and seven little ones to accomplish the task. But I like imagining my cake with all 77 and as many of my writing peers, students, colleagues, and readers beside me as is possible adding their breath, not to extinguish the light, but to imagine all that we have done as we exhale in one chorus.

May we keep the flame of writing going,

even when it is hard,

even when we don’t think anyone will be interested,

even when we are afraid of what we might say,

even when we are afraid that suddenly we have nothing to add,

even when our lives overwhelm us with responsibilities, doctor appointments and administrative tasks,

even when we have received rejections and must pursue more opportunities to publish or must figure out how to fix what was at first rejected,

even when we have lost confidence that we can accomplish what we want to accomplish in our writing.

Even then we will be remembering the way writing has saved us time after time from depression, from feelings of powerlessness, from ennui, from misunderstandings and existential crises, from breakups, helped us find our way out of grief, and so much more.

I am reminded that the number 7 is considered sacred in many religions representing divine intervention and spiritual perfection. When we are in flow with our writing, we experience something larger than ourselves, something feeding us that feels like it is from the divine. As writers we find ways to write our way into flow and later, we listen to what we have written while there, to perfect it as best we can.

May all of you who I imagine standing with me at that cake with 77 candles know and honor the good your writing releases into our world. And please keep on writing.