The sound of the first defiant raindrops hitting the flapping laundry in my great-grandmother’s side yard still to this day finds its way into my mind when I think about writing.
She slides white sheets from the line and haphazardly folds them into a basket that she props against her crooked right hip as she uses her left side to lean against a wooden railing. The weathered structure gives way in all of its defeated strength and leaves her helplessly splayed out in the afternoon grass.
I must have been about 8 years old that day when I was alone with my Granny Donaldson and had to run as hard as I could in the rain to the church next door so the woman vacuuming could call an ambulance.
Granny had diabetes, and eventually doctors removed her foot. I spent years helping my mom, grandmother, and great aunts take care of her in wheelchairs and hospital beds as she went through the long stages of deterioration.
I didn’t fully realize how much she and my other female family members showed up in my writing until a creative writing teacher of mine circled a three-word fragment in a collection of stories I had written about a flood in a small town. My main character was an old woman, and she was stepping down into her flooded first floor in the dark.
“A painless amputation.”
He remarked how striking that phrase was, and to this day I still carry that little gold star achievement in my heart from that writing teacher at Alabama, who ended up becoming an enormous part of my writing education.
In college, studying his lessons on the craft of word choice and sentence deconstruction alongside various lessons about the business of journalistic editing developed my talent for being able to pull together fully formed stories, angles, spreads, outlines, captions, and infographics — all with stylish brevity. Then, an adjunct journalism instructor took me under her wing and had much more confidence in my abilities than I ever had in myself. She gave me a job and a promotion and wonderful insight into magazine writing and editing. The topics were boring, but I soaked up all the knowledge and experience I could.
Since then, I find that women struggling through impossible situations with crooked gaits continue to find themselves prominently staged in my personal writing. I currently have an unwieldy book project I am working on that includes a lot of autobiographical moments related to my grandmothers and my great-grandmother. That project is one of many I carry around in the laundry basket of my mind, and so I feel like I absolutely fall into the category of people who say they write because they simply have to write. Which is true. I do have to write. Just like I have to read and sleep and eat. Writing has just been something I always do.
But I would also like to share a sentiment I just heard about an hour ago in an audiobook that has given me a glittering sense of purposeful inspiration as I was considering this very assignment.
While it is important to consider the reasons behind why I need to create art for the world to see, it is perhaps an even more important question to consider if the world needs to read/hear what I have to say.
I believe so, because I want my writing to help other people feel brave enough to put their own experiences and feelings on paper because the world needs to hear what they have to say. We all need to feel each other’s experiences more. And writing inspires more writing, and more writing inspires change, so I write to change myself and maybe someone else.
Beyond that grand ideal, there are of course selfish reasons why I continue to write.
Before I was in high school, I found my dad’s old high school notebooks in some boxes in a closet. His words were full of poetry and scratchings about listening to music, playing drums, smoking, and wanting love. I read some of them and was amazed. He never really talked about writing poetry, though he did often talk about books and how I should read more Vonnegut. He instead did crossword puzzles in pen and the 5-by-5 sudoku puzzles that would take him weeks to complete. He tried to teach me the drums many times, though I could never really grasp that complicated magic.
His notebooks stayed hidden until almost three years ago, right after Dad was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. I was home, in Alabama, helping mom stay distracted from the diagnosis by cleaning out old boxes in what used to be my room. I took those notebooks back to New Jersey with me a few weeks later and started transcribing them when I had to be back in the real world instead of with my mom and dad. Oddly, it seemed to me that our two writing voices were very similar, and I started writing poetry again, after more than a decade.
When Dad passed away that October, I lost a piece of myself that will never be found, but I have found a connection with him that we never had in this life. I feel like my new poetic voice is part of some conversation that the two of us are still sharing, littered with his music and brilliance.
So maybe, these daily conversations are a way to avoid my grief. Having my dad (and the rest of my lost loved ones) eternally wandering around in my mind as characters living in story moments keeps their love close despite their physical absence — like painless amputations.
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