Where Do I Write?

I read “Do You Have Any Advice for Those of Us Just Starting Out?” by Ron Koertge to my 9th graders this morning. One of their possible writing topics (among others) was to reflect upon a place they enjoy writing. This is what I wrote with them:

Over the years, I’ve had several hidey-holes and isolated spots where I’ve escaped in order to put thoughts to paper. I believe I first started to develop a personal writing habit on the bus traveling back and forth from Newmarket to Lakenheath every day. Good old Bus #11 with the drivers we’d harass until their dentures would come loose or their hair came out in clumps: Trevor, Surfer Joe, and a few others. Quickly tiring of the gossip and drama, and having proved myself not the best poker player, I turned to sketching out poems on colored graph paper, feigning homework. Publication of “Subway” in some obscure British magazine that I never knew the name of gave me the confidence I had lacked throughout junior high.

I remember sitting on a fallen tree at Scout Camp near the English-Scottish border supposedly writing about the environment, taking note of the silence, the flora and fauna, the smell and shape of rain, the interrupting screams of a twelve year old on the receiving end of a wedgie.

Mr. Bainter’s history class became my fiction workshop. “The Ultimate Sin” was a gift. In Mrs. Misselhorn’s, poetry sprouted in the margins of the mundane grammar exercises. Medieval Lit gave birth to haphazard sonnets. Ironically, the only writing that didn’t happen was when I signed up to write for the school paper. Deadlines ate me for breakfast. But the passion to write and publish intensified. “Autumn” somehow appeared in the school paper without a name. I remember overhearing the two advisors for the writing club “Lancer Lot” debating over which of their students could have written it. Ha! I never told them.

I took a creative writing class my senior year and suddenly I had an eager audience. The first pieces of the year sounded like Lord of the Flies. Guess what I had been reading. My writing teacher said my description reminded her of Joseph Conrad, whom I had never read before. So guess what I went to find in the library. Guess who I started to imitate. Then Roald Dahl. Jack London. Poe. I started my own novel, a story about a kid whose life was a living hell, tortured by everyone in his family and in the community—a story worthy of any black turtleneck wearing beatnik, or so I thought. Everyone told me the writing was incredible, so realistic. I’ll confess. Everything I wrote was a lie; all the gut-wrenching pain and angst I poured onto the paper never happened. It was complete garbage. I thought I was pretty hot stuff, though, being able to fool so many people, manipulating emotions and crap like that. Now, looking back though, all I gained was a big head. Weird. I look back at what I wrote and get a little nauseated. I stunk. I was a liar…but I was a writer.

Not too many people know this, but I was voted the graduating class poet—a post the student council created for me. I had buddies ask me to write a poem for their girlfriend to commemorate their two-week anniversary. Kids asked me to write lyrics for their bands: metal, rap, country (which I refused), and even Christian rock. I’m still a little ticked that the poem I wrote for graduation was misprinted in the program.

Frequently, I’d wake up on the floor of my room, pen still in hand, arm contorted from falling asleep on it. I once had to use a muscle relaxant for three weeks to get the feeling back—a fact my mom still doesn’t know about.

At Ricks I’d make a daily pilgrimage to the computer lab, plug into my Discman, and depending on my mood, lose myself in Pink Floyd, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Cause and Effect, Candlebox, or local favorite Agnes Poetry. I began carrying a thesaurus and a dictionary in addition to my notebooks that I’d scratch in. I took a poetry writing class, where we had to write a one poem each day of the semester. My brain pulled more than a muscle from that stretching exercise, and I swore to never write poetry again. But again, I lied.

I’d escape in the middle of the night to watch the harvest moon collide with the Tetons, hole up in the quiet recesses of the performing arts center—a silent sunbeam coming through the semi-curtained glass alcove. I’d bury myself in the stacks on the third floor of the library—bare feet hugging the heat register—and smother myself in mountains of words modern and classic. But the muse only found me when I frequented my favorite haunts. In my apartment with all the roomies, in class, walking across campus, the well was dry.

Now, what seems like several lifetimes later, the locations have changed, time has passed, I have a lower center of gravity. But inside, with the exception of a missing appendix, I’m still the same me, only I’ve molted—shed my skin a few times when it became too restrictive. I’ve found new places to write: my desk, my car, the side of a newly-frosted autumn carpet mountain in October. But now I don’t hide. I don’t need physical isolation to write any more. The turbulent stream of life continues to rush past, but the difference lies in the fact that now I can call a time-out in the busiest of traffic jams, the noisiest of restaurants, and even the most trying of bedtimes; and capture my thoughts in words no matter where I am.
And whether I can scribble down notes in the moment, or if I have to mentally capture an image and reconstruct it later, I can still find the solidarity that writing brings no matter where I am. It’s more of a mental construction site, if you will, rather than a shadowy corner or a sundrenched bedspread—my own (un)tidy hobbit hole, where no one can enter unless they’re invited. My special writing place materializes wherever I make the time to lose myself in my thoughts and my words. It exists whenever I invite specific chunks of memory and image and emotion over for pizza and the game. I write wherever an idea stops to say hello, or goodbye, or whatever.

It's rough, I know, but it needed to come out.