What Writing Means to Me.
by Susan L. Feathers
When I was eight years old, my parents gave me a tan suede journal, stitched with one long loop of rawhide. A small black bear with the inscription, “The Great Smoky Mountains” adorned the cover. Inside, a penciled entry dated July 13, 1953, describes a picnic with my grandparents when black bears ate scraps out of a garbage can. So much for auspicious beginnings!
Yet it was the beginning of a love affair with words - with paper, fountain pens and soft, lead pencils. Writing became a sensory banquet: cedar wood shavings, acrid black ink, and lavish loops and lines. My writing practice rushed from the immediateness of youth to gestalt by the time I turned twelve: a holy writ of internal conversations that became a song with refrains so that I began to know my lies and truths and the ironies of my time.
On daily pages I found a place where I could push around my thoughts like pieces of a puzzle until they made sense in natural juxtapositions. The pen became an extension of my brain, a human-machine partnership moving thought outward beyond gray matter onto a white plain for further examination.
Writing has always been an integral part of how I function in this world and find my way through it. Rarely do I arrive at insights without the act of writing. Then, and only then, can I express in conversation how I feel or think about something. For me writing is more than pleasure and esthetics: it is a tool. Humans, after all, are the tool makers.
I take up this tool, then…
From behind the curtain I snag a fleeting figure that squirms and wriggles on the tip of my pen. It is plopped upon the stage in the bright light, a puddle. Gradually separated into a limb here, a toe there, round shoulders and thick hair, a girl emerges and sits up pushing back at the pen.
“You shouldn’t do that, you know!” she shouts indignantly.
The pen scratches an answer across the floor in front of her upturned feet.
“Humph. What gives you the right? You wouldn’t know what to do without me and you know it. You need me as much as I need you. So don’t get too big for your stylus.”
They laugh. Okay. Let’s tell a story, the pen scratches more modestly now.
“See that guy back there, the one planting that tree? You need him and that mangy dog, too. Bring ‘em out here.”
In a short time the boy and dog lie stunned beside the girl. They stare back at her and then the boy notices the handwriting on the floor.
“Oh I see,” the gaunt youth murmurs. He is wearing tattered work pants.
“You don’t see,” the girl retorts. “This is life or death.”
The youth whistles to the dog taking a pee at the edge of the circle of light. It trots jauntily across the stage to the man.
Behind them, a figure appears in the curtain’s folds—an elbow here, a knee there, forms and fades like a faint image on an old silent film.
The three companions squint into the light of exposure. The dog whimpers.
“Well?” they inquire.
I rise to boil water for tea.
The girl leans close so not to be heard, “Geesh, she’s such a procrastinator. We could be here for hours, days even!”
Later, when I take up my pen, I find the three snoozing in a pile. I scratch the pen across the paper. The girl sits up on one elbow.
“Thought you’d never return.” She ignores the terrifying thought they could be sent to oblivion.
Scribbling rouses the others.
“What’s happening?” The boy is drowsy, bored really.
“We’re getting on with the story-telling.”
The yellow dog yawns. It’s really pathetic.
A pause for reflection - the holy ground, the compost pile… the girl begins.
“Once there was a village nestled among hills and surrounded by apple orchards. In springtime the sweet perfume of blossoms came over you like a heavy blanket, and swooning, you just had to lie down in a grassy field and watch the puffy, white clouds float on a sky so evenly blue it made you weep inside.”
The boy was listening intently. He rises tall and lanky, crumpled clothes on a bent hanger, and plunges his hands in the deep pockets of his overalls.
“My Daddy was a hardened kind of man with the softest gray eyes you’ll ever see. He was gruff and his hands were like No. 3 sandpaper when he touched you, but you always knew from those eyes that he meant to love you.”
The little yellow-haired dog looks up at the boy intently.
“We had a collie named Bullet. Pulled him from a cardboard box when he was just a pup up at Kroger’s. He was the prettiest little thing - yellowy gold with dark eyes swimming.”
The girl steps out in front. She stands silent for a moment, hand propped on one hip, a compact and well-proportioned form. She speaks with resolve.
“The thing was, change was coming for us all, but we didn’t see it. Down in our little valley, time just wasn’t goin’ anywhere…people picked apples, baked pies, visited…”
Suddenly the dog jumps up and runs around the stage, careening inward with centripetal forces as he accelerates, toes scratching and sliding across the polished surface. Then it halts, frozen like a statue, one paw suspended, and stares into the empty theater like it sees something there that should be noted by the others.
The boy considers his dog. The pen hovers. The girl is impatient.
“That’s right, Bullet. It did happen that way. When that woman came to town - the one with all the ambitions and dreams…” The boy’s revelation shifts the mood.
The pen snags another form behind the curtain. It screams in protest. A heap of long legs and blond curls drops in front of them. “You lied! You said I’d never have to be on stage,” she snarls.
Then Bullet trots over and licks her face up one side and the ruby lips part into a reluctant smile. She grabs his head and kisses his nose.
“Ok-ok-ok-ok, okaaaay,” she acquiesces and stands up straightening out her short skirt. She peers beyond the circle of light, holding a hand above squinted eyes.
“So this is it - the stage. But, where’s the audience?
“No script yet,” sputters the girl with the freckles and red hair. She’s looking the woman up and down suspiciously.
The pen hovers, drops to the page in anticipation.
“Miss?” the boy is standing near the tall woman. He clears his throat.
“Miss, I was just wondering why you came to our village anyway?”
The young woman stares past the boy now, deep in thought as if she is trying to retrieve something long lost from her memory.
“Back then it all seemed crystal clear: I was going to make the town over, bring it up to par.” She smiled ironically, a dimple forming on one cheek. “I couldn’t see then that it was already perfect.”
“Maybe you just needed to be needed,” the girl offered cautiously.
“I thought you was runnin’ away from something.” The boy interjects.
The woman was sitting down now, cross-legged, and the dog was in her lap. She stroked its head and smiled down at it. There was ease in the moment.
“I wasn’t running away…I was running to…” she pauses, then goes on...“Do you remember when we got that journal - the one with the little black bear?”
“Yeah, I remember that,” the boy nods.
The woman grins and lifts Bullet’s head, gazing into shining, brown pools.
“That’s when my real life began.”