When I was in third grade, my teacher asked me to write a Chanukah play to be presented along with a Christmas play for the kids in my class. I am not sure how she identified me as a writer. Perhaps we wrote stories for class and she liked mine. How did I even know about dialog? Maybe we read plays in class.

What I do remember with certainty is myself beginning to write the play by naming my characters. I remember scratching out the name Mary, which I loved, and changing it to Ruth. My first real writer’s decision. Mary would be for a Christmas play. Ruth seemed better for a Chanukah play.

Turns out that names are an important part of writing.

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In fourth grade, I am reading about 10-year-old Janey Larkin, the protagonist of Blue Willow. She has a china blue willow plate and it is the most beautiful thing in her life, now that her father is an itinerant worker, leaving Janey without a house she can call her own like she used to or any friends, as her family has to follow crops from farm to farm.

Lupe Romero, daughter of the Mexican family who live in the shack across from the one Janey Larkin’s family lives in, carries her baby sister over to where Janey sits on steps. She tells Janey that she has a brother, too, and that a brother and sister are better than anything and it is too bad that Janey doesn’t have any. Janey doesn’t realize that Lupe is trying to make a teasing brother and a bothersome baby attractive, so Janey feels Lupe is putting on airs and having made herself a promise to never let anyone make her feel inferior, Janey says that she has a china willow plate and that is better than brothers or sisters or anything.

Then when Janey invites Lupe into the family’s shack, not even one as substantial as the shack Lupe’s family lives in, Janey’s mother says that Janey is a “runty little thing.” The girls know somehow that the mother’s words are not really meant for them but were more of her talking to herself.

Turns out Blue Willow is touted as an important fictional account of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression and has been called The Grapes of Wrath for children (Janey’s family left Texas for CA during the Dust Bowl and the book takes place near Fresno). It won a Newbery Honor and many other awards. But to me, the grade school reader, it was a story I could enter through Janey’s eyes, a story that has stayed with me through the years. A story that taught me that books are about real emotions and real interpersonal relationships as well as about real times and places and families and social problems and overcoming the sadness of moving and missing friends. As their fathers work the fields, Janey and Lupe learn that making connections and appreciating diverse expressions of love and understanding are the way out of loneliness.

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When I was in junior high school, I discovered the New Yorker magazine. My school friend’s parents subscribed. The magazine confused me. The Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan and Family Circle magazines my mother received had tables of contents at the front of each issue. So did The Readers’ Digest and National Geographic magazines at the doctor and dentists’ offices. The titles of the articles and the names of the authors were listed in those tables. The New Yorker magazines at my friend’s house had neither. Why? I’d search through the whole magazine, each issue I found there, looking for the name of the authors of the individual articles to no avail.

I am not usually courageous enough to ask questions in large audiences of people when the speaker opens the venue to the promised Q & A, but one year at a very large arts festival in Seattle in the 1980s, I did ask my question. The presentation had been from a then current editor at the New Yorker. He asked what we wanted to know about the magazine. There were questions about submitting articles and poems and there were questions about how editors looked at the work. My question was about why the authors weren’t named in those years I’d first found the magazine, or was I mistaken? Perhaps I was remembering it incorrectly.

Turns out, I had remembered correctly. There was a time in the magazine’s history, he said, where the lack of bylines was thought to be part of creating a gestalt for the magazine. Here’s an article that explains this thinking, at least about no bylines in the “Talk of the Town” section that seems to have stayed byline-less longer than the features.

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During my high school years, I tell my father something I’ve learned from a novel about family relationships, something that makes me sad. He tells me it’s just a story. But what about what I’ve learned? To me, it’s a story more real than anything I have been asked to believe.

Turns out there can be more truth in fiction than in reality since reality tries to obscure the truth.

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I am in my sophomore year in college thinking I will definitely be a biology major because the most wonderful teacher in our high school, Mr. Jaeger, taught biology. He made it exciting; it was exciting. I am taking my sophomore year prerequisites — first-semester microbiology. We are each issued a frog embryo and a baby hair to dissect the embryo under a dissecting scope. I make two trips back to the dispensary, one for another baby hair (I dropped mine) and one for another embryo (I butchered mine with that second baby hair). Second semester, I drop hot zinc on my lab partner’s hand, know it hurts, watch his red wound scar and scab for weeks.

I go to the university’s bookstore. Volumes of contemporary poetry seem to fall into my hands though I am not meaning to reach for them.

The next year, I carry armloads of literature to the house I share with four others to read for my classes. I am an English major now. They think I am crazy to have traded multiple choice tests for writing papers.

Turns out I am home.

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After teaching English in a middle school, I decide to get a Masters in Creative Writing. I must take a Critical Theory class. What is critical theory? “A philosophical approach to culture, and especially to literature, that seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces and structures that produce and constrain it.”

My professor wants each of us in her seminar to lead a class discussion on one of the high modernist books she has selected for us to read. I choose Djuana Barnes’ 1936 novel, Nightwood, because it has an introduction by T.S. Elliot. You must read this book as you would a poem, he instructs. I believe I know how to do that.

I discover anti-Semitic stereotypes and language in the novel. I research what I’ve gleaned as I walked in the field of the novel’s images. I lead my discussion with this discovery. I also write my paper about this.

Ms. Allen gives me a C. It’s practically a failing grade for a graduate student. I didn’t write a theoretical paper, her note on the paper says. But, but ideological forces and structures that produce and constrain it, I think.

I go to see her in her office. She tells me she wrote poems but she put them away to get ahead in academia. She tells me she can’t publish an article she wrote for the New York Times now that she has learned what she has from the information in my paper.

Why does something so impactful deserve a C? Why is what I wrote not in keeping with the definition of critical theory? Will these always be questions for me?

I cry in my advisor’s office. He is the poet Richard Blessing and he gives me his benediction: “You are a poet, Sheila. I don’t expect you to write a critical theoretical paper.”

He will someday tell me that he types all of his poems for the sound and the rhythm of the typing, which seems to help him. He will tell me he begins by writing each poem as well as he can from a beginning to an ending. In my first years using a computer, I will have to have the keyboard make the sound of a typewriter and the only font I will use is Times New Roman because it looks like the type of a typewriter. I still write from a beginning to an end, but in revision, the beginning may call to me from the middle and the middle may need more to get to the end.

I am a writer, not a critical theorist. I produce my work. If critical theorists want to discuss its place in the culture, I’d be honored.

Turns out, in 2018 there is an article in the Guardian newspaper about Djuna Barnes Nightwood. The headline reads, “Djuna Barnes writing is exhilarating — but steeped in the worse of its era.” The article goes on to say, “… Nightwood contains a lot of nonsensical guff about race and blood. Barnes may have shrugged off some of the conventions of her world, but in other ways, she was in thrall to the fashions of her day.”

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After receiving my graduate degree, I’ve become a freshman composition instructor at Shoreline Community College, north of Seattle. One day, I go to the school library between my morning and my afternoon class. I decide to browse a rack of old Paris Review journals, a venue known for its author interviews. I reach for one and find an interview with Faulkner. In Ms. Allen’s class, one of the students had taken on the high modernist Faulkner novel, The Sound and the Fury. He wanted us all to discuss “the pleasure of the text” based on French deconstructionist analysis he had read. Many of the students’ pleasure was, they said, that they could peel Faulkner’s story like an onion because of its layers. When it was my turn, I said simply that the pleasure of the text for me was all that mud on young Caddies underclothes. The class seemed to do a collective cough at my silliness and the student discussion leader went on to the next student.

Turns out that I have the last laugh that day in the Shoreline Community College library, though no one from my class is there to hear my guffaw. The Paris Review interviewer asks Faulkner how he begins a novel. With a kernel image, Faulkner answers, always with a kernel image. In the case of The Sound and the Fury, he adds, it was mud on that little girl Caddie’s underclothes. In fact, a recent analysis of the novel at this link talks about the importance of the mud this way:

What her brothers remember, however, is this moment: “She was wet. We were playing in the branch and Caddy squatted down and got her dress wet and Versh said, “Your mommer going to whip you for getting your dress wet.” (1.187-8)

For Faulkner, this moment is the emotional center of the novel. The image of a little girl with muddy drawers becomes something that revolves through all of the characters’ memories

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Do you have memories down through the decades that seem now that writing has been calling to you? What are those scenes, that dialog, your thinking at the time? Your thinking now? Turns out, I am sure that you do. Try writing your writer’s journey by recreating those scenes to answer such questions.