WHY I WRITE

Two things being a ‘Navy Brat’ did for me was to give me a lot of adventures and a lot of time alone. This sounds like fertile ground for a future writer to grow up in. I moved thirteen times before I entered eighth grade. School systems varied from place to place so I was always playing catch up in my studies. This helped me to be a very self disciplined student because I had to do most of the catching up on my own. Of course, it also explains why I barely graduated from high school but that is another tale for another time. During those formative years I also learned how to entertain myself, always being the new kid on the block. I made friends pretty easily, thanks to my excellent baseball skills. I would find the game, join in and hit a few homeruns and it was instant acceptance, not only for me but also for my little brother, who couldn’t play worth beans, but if he didn’t play, neither did I. If I wasn’t playing ball or war (that’s what kids on Navy bases play), I actually liked playing by myself. I had a set of cowboys and Indians and I would play with them for hours, making up stories and acting them out. I also played with paper dolls and acted out stories that any of today’s soap operas would be knocking on my door to buy. Oh the dramas I could think up. I wish now that I had written them down. I am sure that I would be famous and would have Oprah on my show. But they were just stories that I had fun making up and are now lost in space somewhere.

I did begin writing my dramas down when I got into junior high school. I would come home from school after a bad day and I would sit down and write my day over. I would be the star, the popular kid, and everything I did or said was fantastic. This actually made me feel better at least until the next day when I had to return to school as the real me.

When I was a junior in high school I had the best English teacher I ever had. The first ten minutes of every class Mr. Moran had us simply write whatever came to mind as quickly as we could. Then we would read them to the class. I loved doing these exercises and knew that one day I wanted to be a writer. My head got a little big as I soaked in all the encouragement Mr. Moran gave me. Fortunately my senior English teacher was equally good, and tolerant of the creative nature I had developed. Several times I would ask for extensions on writing assignments simply because “I’m just not feeling inspired.” It sounds weird now but I think I actually believed it. Mrs. McGrab apparently did too because she always gave me the extension as well as an A on my paper. I took one of those vocation tests seniors had to take and way ahead of everything else I scored ‘author’. A distant second was ‘teacher’. That sounded good to me so I began to order my life in that direction.

English and Physical Education were my favorite classes and I got all A’s in them. Unfortunately the other subjects paled both in my interest and in decent grades. I managed to graduate but it took a lot of pleading and begging and extra credit work. I had applied to a teacher’s college in western Maryland and went for my interview. The woman interviewing me wasn’t impressed with my ability to ace two subjects and looked more at the other subjects and my overall test grades. She told me I wasn’t a good candidate for their school and I should think about a junior college. The funny thing about that interview was that I noticed she had missed the top button on her blouse and had continued the error down her front. I remember thinking that I may not be smart enough for their college but at least I could dress myself properly. Needless to say that experience didn’t do much for my self esteem and I entered a junior college knowing that my diva status was gone forever. But actually it turned out ok because the depression and hopelessness gave me good fodder for the hippie poet I was to become in the late 1960’s. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind, and Leonard Cohen became my new studies and I hung around with other poet’s in coffee houses and in the parks. I flunked out of school and majored in the 60’s culture for about ten years. I filled notebooks with poems about the war, about lost innocence, and a lot of existential nothingness. I became my art, dressing in black (beret included) and smoking cigarettes (the kind you rolled yourself). My best friend and I would sit around, candles dripping down Chianti bottles, drinking wine and talking about how we would live destitute on the streets and then become famous after we died. Sad but true; the diva had gone to the dark side.

Fortunately after the late sixties came the early seventies and a new movement struck my fancy. The lost hippies were turning to Jesus and it was during the Jesus Movement that my life turned around. I had an encounter with Jesus, what some might call a born again experience and my spiritual journey began. Instead of writing down and out depressing poems and songs I was writing Bible studies and praise and worship songs. Instead of protesting war, I was praising God and offering an alternative answer to the emptiness that the 60’s left in its wake. I found a goal and a purpose and a ministry.

I returned to school and got a degree in Behavioral Science. The program was like heaven for me. I had a choice of 2 tracts. One was attending class and taking exams; the other was independent study and writing papers. I chose the second and spent two years writing my way to a degree. This time I had a 4.0 average and was on the deans list (for good stuff this time) throughout my stay there. All that, and being able to button my blouse correctly! The world was mine for the taking.

In 1995 I ran into the daughter of the owner of a camp that I had previously worked at for thirteen years. She offered me a job and I returned to Camp after a twenty year absence. Times had changed a lot and so did camp policies and procedures. In my first camp experience we pretty much followed oral tradition. Now everything had to be in writing. Part of my job was to do just that. I had to put Valley Mill Camp on paper. I developed and wrote staff handbooks, parent handbooks, policy and procedure notebooks, training manuals, reports, and who does what charts, so that we could pass an accreditation visit from the county, the state and The American Camping Association, who governs camps nationwide. I would sit and stare at the bookshelves full of my work and yet I never considered myself a writer during that time period. I longed to get back into my right brain and make my living writing poetry and doing my journal workshops and writing material that would help people get to know God better.
Evelyn, my boss, called me the wordsmith of Valley Mill but I saw myself as anything but that. It’s strange how a perception of what a writer is can make a difference in how I saw myself; Camp director, administrator yes, but writer, no, even though that was about 80% of what I did in those positions.

One of the blessings of being employed by a summer camp year round is that I got to spend my winters anywhere I wanted. I moved to Rehoboth Beach, DE and lived there from October through April for four years. This was my time to do my writing. I developed a daily schedule and kept to it. I wrote every day, working on projects that I wanted to someday do something with, like publish them and perhaps become a famous writer. All of them remain unfinished in my project file and are just waiting to be resurrected someday; a book for my workshop on keeping a journal, a book on discipleship and stewardship, a spiritual autobiography, and a book on Camp orientation for caring counselors. They are patiently awaiting their due time and attention.

Throughout all these years writing was the constant. The themes and contents have changed but not the practice. I love the process of writing. I write with pen and paper because I like the feeling of connection that they give me to the work and the words. I don’t dream of being a famous writer anymore, although I wouldn’t turn down an offer if it came my way. I’ve also come to see that there are a whole lot of people who write better than me and that is truly ok. What I do know is that only I can say what I want or have to say and therefore only I can write it. I am not concerned with the product as much as I am the process. It’s the process of writing that hooked me from the very beginning. I could make myself feel happy by sitting down and rewriting my day. I have kept a journal since 1973 and I write in it every morning. If I miss a day, something is missing for me in the way that day goes. There is something in the process of writing what connects me to my self, to the environment that surrounds me, and most important to the God who created me and loves me and to whom I have devoted my life to love and serve. I am my ministry and writing is part of the process that makes me who I am.