FlashFiction.Net

I recently asked an illustrious group of writers, "What do you find within yourself when you write? Is it something that you find at other times?—or is it something that you find only through writing?" Because I don't have permission to write their answers here, I'll talk instead about what arose in me reading their answers, that sense of community, the feeling that I've found my people. It might be too much to say that I wept reading what they confronted & experienced when writing, but I felt that building of pressure behind the eyes that my therapist tells me is what other people call "emotion," but I have no word for.

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A week or so ago, I  received a Facebook message from a college friend who said he'd found a short story I'd written, and he wondered if I'd like it sent to me. I'd forgotten that I wrote stories in college and a few years afterwards. I remember getting, according to those in it with me, "destroyed"  in writing workshops, even freshman composition, with professors at least three times feeling that they needed to ask me if I were okay afterwards (I remember one professor asking, after one student took particular exception to my story and to me, "What did you do to her?"). Following graduation, I moved to Chicago and managed a resume writing office, then went back to school to teach high school, taught it for 14 years. At the age of 38, I applied to an MFA program, received a prompt rejection, took courses with Les Edgerton and Terri Brown-Davidson, reapplied, got accepted, and again in my first workshop got rather beat up (or at least people in the workshop got the sense that I'd been beaten up), with a faculty member once again asking me if I were okay.

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In every case, I was okay. I really was. I don't quite grasp why, since the very first time I shared my writing, that I was okay no matter what happened after that. Whether someone loved it or hated it, I felt the same (well, maybe a bit better if he/she loved it). Knowing what their writing means to writers, I'm amazed not so much at what the world asks of its writers—the workshops, the feedback, the rejections, that process of ongoing doubt—but of writers' ability to withstand it all.

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It's no wonder children's literature is full of magic, that answer to  kids' wish for power in a world that denies it to them. Writing was the magic of my childhood, and each time I write I find that childhood within me, and contained within that childhood, for some reason beyond me, was the recognition that writing was a magic that I wielded, that my writing, my own particular magic, belonged to me and to no one else. It is the thing I set against the world, the defining boundary between me and them.

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So, the message from today's session is this: Think of all the things you get from writing and remember how much those things are yours, how much they mean to you, how much none of those things have anything to do with what the world does with & to your writing.

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