How It Started
It started with word games. In the beginning I loved hearing my family read Dr. Seuss to me and stumble over the words. My aunt Carol made a game of reading the titles of Tom & Jerry cartoons before they faded offscreen. I had a favorite laundry detergent when I was 6 years old because they spelled the brand: A-L-L, the stain-lifter, that’s All. Once I had a handle on the alphabet I graduated to more sophisticated games like word searches and the newspaper jumble.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love reading. In school I’d get in trouble for not following along as we read aloud. My kindergarten teacher thought I wasn’t paying attention because I was reading ahead, the labored attempts of my slower classmates too slow to hold my attention. In a split classroom, I focused on what the first graders in the room were taught instead of what was on offer on the kindergarten side. I complained loudly and frequently to my parents and teachers that I was bored.
We started writing in school. I loved spelling tests and vocabulary workbooks, but until I learned about essays, I just thought that words were for play. When I was asked to write a description of my dream kitchen, though, my people-pleasing tendencies took over and I felt a powerful urge to bring that kitchen to life for my teachers and the nice people who would be grading the state-wide writing test.
The Ego Stroked, Backward
Maybe I was an especially naive child, but I believed every word of praise given me about my writing skills. I didn’t buy the obligatory “he’s so handsome” schtick the family and the checkout line ladies offered, and it was difficult to convince me of other kinds of prowess, but if someone wanted to talk to me about words, I listened. Maybe it was because writing was less subjective; there was a right and a wrong way to spell, whereas there were many kinds of “handsome.” Besides, my social experiences to date had not borne out that “handsome” appellation. Maybe it was because writing took place in a bubble, and my responses to any feedback could be based on what I had written, thereby alleviating the need to think on my feet in conversation (see aforementioned social awkwardness). Hell, maybe I really liked the attention. It wasn’t focused on me, after all. Everyone was busy looking at the pieces of paper with my handwriting on them. I have been accused of being a closet extrovert before.
My boredom in the classroom eventually became compounded by an inability to articulate on the fly my increasingly complex take on what we were reading. Yes, Lord of the Flies, symbolism, I know. Yes, that’s a phallic symbol. Yes, metaphors! I couldn’t figure out why these things were being exalted as if they were nuggets my classmates found while panning for gold or an A+ class-participation grade. For me that stuff was in plain sight, part of the text. I was more interested in how all those parts fit together, what they did when you held them all in your head at once. Class discussions were frustrating, but by middle school we were also writing essays about what we read. And, inevitably, it became known that I was “smart.”
I don’t know why they did it. Maybe my teachers, noting that I never volunteered answers in class, wanted to salvage my own participation grade. It could be that they were sadists who took great joy in watching me writhe, roasting in the heat of my own blood rising to my face each time they insisted that I read an essay aloud. All I know is my introvert self had trouble with a silent classroom listening to my cracking voice given authority.
The Illusion of Confidence
I don’t have anything to say. People often insist that I do, but I have nothing more to say than anyone else does. This is why I continue to encourage everyone I meet who says they have a story to tell, they ought to write a book. I am a huge advocate for writing, obviously. I think everyone should do it. The act of telling stories is the act of learning a little more about yourself, and we all could use more of that. I think we tend not to examine deeply enough. I also think we are lazy communicators, and writing is an effortful means of communication that tends to lead to more thoughtful engagement with other people.
My gift, if I have one, is organizational. I have the same thoughts as most people, maybe slightly less addled by American Idol than most, but still. What I do is present those thoughts well. Especially when I am telling stories about my past, I have to achieve a pretty thorough understanding of the experience, from many different angles.
I have a friend whose frequent refrain is that I write authoritatively, as if I know what I’m talking about and am presenting inevitable conclusions. It’s true that I see systems in the world and patterns within them that don’t seem to be apparent to everyone. I see ways for disparate concepts to fit together. If, when I package what I see into a tidy whole, it makes sense to other people, that doesn’t make me an authority. As far as I can tell, it’s just the most complete manifestation of my two favorite activities: playing with words and anthologizing.
These are not new ideas, so I won’t claim to have anything to say. I’ve read too much by people who do have something to say to accept that mantle. I will accede, however, my ability to put things a certain way that seems persuasive to people. I promise to only use this power for good. Or for amusement. Mine, not yours.
Telling My Story to Myself
I know no one more convinced of the power of storytelling than Richard Hoffman, Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College. He taught a class while I was there, and I can’t remember what he called it but I called it the Apocalypse Memoir Survey. He’d compiled a reading list of memoirs written during the worst upheavals of the 20th century. One of my aims in taking the class was to finally get a few pieces of history to stay in my head. I hoped that the narrative format would be easier to grok than the neverending true/false quizzes administered by my AP history teachers in high school. What I found were testimonies.
History’s view is by necessity epic. Significant events get convenient labels like the World Wars, the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the Velvet Revolution. This scope does not permit individual lives, and that’s what the memoirs were for. They humanized the unspeakable atrocities of the 20th century, victims and perpetrators alike. Each week we discussed the purpose of telling such stories, the urgency of bearing witness.
The other thing Richard wanted to teach us with his apocalypse memoirs was the importance of telling our own stories to ourselves. I entered the class a memoir skeptic. I left it ready to enroll in Richard’s memoir-writing workshop. The question I always come round to of who I am and how I got that way was in the pages of every book we read, on the lips of every writer. How could I pass up a chance to search for those answers for college credit? And, speaking as both editor and voyeur, how could I miss the chance to help my classmates grapple with the same thing?
I only had the vaguest notion of what the questions were when I started writing about myself. Now I have a better idea of the questions and a vague notion of how to find some of the answers. I still feel presumptuous writing about myself. I have opinions, yes. I have a history. Who cares? I console myself with the fact that I’m not trying to sell anything.
Eyeballs in the Darkness
It turns out some people do care. My memoir workshop classmates were interested in my story because it was exotic and I was a peculiar specimen: a Southern boy in a New England grad school writing about faith and coming of age. I haven’t lived in my hometown in more than a decade, which has kept a gulf growing between me and my family. Some of them have read what I write, and taken the time to let me know it. I’ve been surprised at how touched I feel to know that as I try to explain me to myself other people in my life are just as curious.
Maybe, as it’s been suggested to me, it’s a little like finding someone’s diary and looking for entries about yourself. Maybe the time and space that have separated me from my family is more easily bridged than it often seems to be.
Writing is a little like walking through a cartoon forest at night, watching predatory eyeballs blink on and off. I can only do it when I think nobody is watching. Clearly though I want people to read what’s here. Why else would it be online? Why else would I let people know when there’s new material here? The forest isn’t just a cartoon, and it isn’t there only when I’m writing. There is only one means of illumination: All of you, let me see your eyes.
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David
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Tonya
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