Me, as a Writer

                I write because it’s easy. The pushing I have to do to make it past the stuck word is like scratching an itch or stretching my legs after a long car ride. There’s relief after it arrives, and I don’t worry at all if it will come. It will come. It always does.

                I don’t value my writing because of that. I don’t sweat over it and fight it. I simply let it out and there it is.

                The only real criticism that I’ve ever received was my junior year of high school. I’d just come from another session of a creative writing class in which I’d been commended and treated as an expert. I was the creative writing student of the year for two years running and saw no particular challenge for a three-peat. I sauntered into my journalism class and our laissez-faire instructor, Mr. C. His hands off approach meant that I had no actual idea of what he was like as a teacher. He’d look over our shoulders every once in a while, but the editors ran the class. I was an editor.

                I had a poem in my hand when I walked through the door – one that the creative writing teaching had oo’d and ah’d over just moments before. She’d clucked about this literary magazine and that one and publication and imagery, and Mr. C could smell the smugness when I walked through the door.

                “What’ve you got there, Jeff?” he asked.

                “Latest poem,” I answered.

                “Lemme see…” I handed him the poem.

                It was about winter. Something about snow and frozenness, I’m sure. It probably included the word “crystalline”. I watched his face as he read it, and my concern started to grow when it didn’t begin to glow with wonder. His eyes didn’t widen and refocus as he read something that – boom – demanded to be read closely. That was life-changing.

                “It’s pretty,” he said.

                “Thanks,” I reached to take it back.

                “But what does it mean?” he didn’t move to give it to me.

                I stopped short hand in my grasp. Mean? “What? It’s…winter, you know…cold…nothing…” I trailed off both offended and worried. I felt naked. He’d uncovered my fear all along. Yes, I can put these words together, make it sound like meaning and sense, but what did it mean?

                He put the poem back in my hand and turned to go sit back at his desk. I wasn’t angry at him. If anything, he’d pulled back a curtain I’d known was there all along.

                I remember watching a home improvement show much later, after I was married, and seeing a designer hang curtains in a room with no windows. He’d walked in and said, “This room needs a window.” And instead of the major construction of putting a hole in the wall, he simply hung curtains where one should go. I remember thinking, ‘Geez, at least paint a window behind it. Maybe an African savannah or something.’ But I think my writing in high school was like that window. Decorations of nothing. I stopped writing for anything but assignments.

                But I can feel myself wanting to write – I’ve been feeling it for the past few years – and I feel the worry now of pulling back those curtains. Twenty years later, I realize that I have to write to find out if I have any meaning, if there will be a landscape behind those curtains or if I’ll pull them back to find a blank wall staring back at me.