To Be a Writer, You Must Shelter All Living Things

I had absolutely no creative ambitions until my fourth grade teacher told my class about a contest for poetry about the environment. Lured by the prospect of fame and recognition, and shamelessly pandering to the market, I wrote a poem called "Learn to Be an Environment." The first line was, "To be an environment, you must shelter all living things." It was genius, obviously, and I did win honorable mention in the contest. I was photographed for the local paper sitting in a tree (because I looooved the environment sooooo much) and I got to miss school to go with my parents to the Park Plaza Hotel for an awards ceremony at which both Ted Kennedy and Derek Sanderson (a former Bruin and also, I think I recall from his speech, a recovering addict) spoke. I didn't catch a lot of it because I was admiring my certificate and the gilt ceiling so much, but I assume that they both loved the environment, too.

My creative spark lay dormant for many years after my early success. There must not have been any incentives offered. Finally, my senior year of high school, I had to do a final project for my humanities class. So I put on my genius hat and wrote a story about a girl who can't sleep. She has never seen the ocean, and she thinks perhaps it will save her from the emptiness that she feels, so she drives and drives and drives to it in an insomniac haze. When she arrives, it is disappointing (I believe the last line is "More nothingness."). At no time does she interact with any other characters. This might seem like a bold, experimental, and even existential choice, and it absolutely was. I knew exactly what I was doing.

My friend Beth made a painting of the girl (she had no name -- another very deliberate artistic choice) contemplating the shadowy darkness on the other side of the canvas. It was reminiscent, if not directly imitative of, the work of Edvard Munch. I gave a reading of my work to the class, and Beth took questions about her painting. She was not able to answer them very articulately, and a couple of years later she admitted to having been drunk that whole day (It was the last week of school, and apparently some of the kids were doing this? I was not invited). We received an A- because the teacher said I could have read it more dramatically (no mention was made of Beth's slurred speech). I protested that I'd had a cold, and that anyway, the nameless girl has been rendered incapable of expressing emotion — that was the whole point! But he wouldn't budge. That was the day I caught my first glimpse of how misunderstood my work would be.

I did, in all seriousness, have a great creative writing teacher my first semester of college. She was a grad student in poetry, and she made me feel like I could be a writer. I remember she wrote on one exercise, a dialogue thing that was probably the first good scene I ever wrote (never mind that it was the true story of my unrequited love for a boy who had a girlfriend back home), "I wish I had written this." Still have that in my filing cabinet. I spent time polishing every exercise, and Polly steered me away from some of the more, um, melodramatic and widely misunderstood aspects of my prose style. By the end of the semester, I had switched my major from International Relations (read: Pre-law) to Writing Seminars (read: Pre-?)

The End.

Kate