My First Blog
I have been writing for more than twenty years now. In 2008, I came to a crossroads of sorts as I was trying to write the, “great American novel,” but as I wrote, fantasy elements would appear. At the time, I thought I had to be a “serious” writer. I’d had a great teacher in college and I’d taken all the literature courses. I’d gone to the Cannon Beach writer’s retreat in Oregon. I’d won a few minor awards for poetry in my college’s publication. I was determined that my work would one day be studied in college courses and sign books with a glass of bourbon in my hand like a Poet Laureate I once met, I was serious. So, when a fantasy element or magical realism popped up in my great American story, I deleted it. I was killing my own imagination despite that reading Tolkien, Brooks, Weis and Hickman and others got me through traumatic and difficult times as a kid. I learned from those authors how to use my imagination, and here I was as a writer, avoiding it.
On December 12th 2008, I had taken the day off work solely to write, I was working on my great “literary” debut when I felt like someone was holding me under water. This pressing need to write some great piece of literature was suffocating me. I stopped typing and made a guttural sound, as if the caveman in me had woken up and wanted to smash something. “Fuck it!” I said. “I’m going to write what I want to write.” As I spoke those words, I became free.
There I sat, at the kitchen table, my dogs looked at me as if I was losing my mind and in a way, I did. My mind opened to itself and I felt like I could see the world from where I was sitting. By the time I was done that day, I had drawn a map, written a creation story, came up with main characters and the names of gods and goddesses. I was writing, really writing. For me, “really writing,” means that I actually had something to write. I couldn’t stop it. I had discovered a new world, one that was real and had people in it, animals, land and oceans.
From that moment on, the people in this world I was creating woke me up every day. It was as if there was a tall, northern woman dressed in armor tapping me to wake up and get to the computer and start writing. Every time I walked my dogs then I could hear the little girl with the crow’s feathers marked on her arm asking me when I would get back to it. At work I couldn’t sit in my cubicle and work without a knight and his barbarian friend drinking ale and constantly poking at me to tell their stories.
The writing took over my life and I loved it. It got me through every awful, stressful day and every wonderful one. You can call it the muse or creativity or whatever word makes you feel right, I had a story to tell and it was alive. Ever since I finished that book I’ve been chasing that very same feeling. I still need to publish it, which is an entirely different chase all its own.
I have not gone back to that world but a few times since, writing what amounts to be a few short stories and a novelette. I miss it, and I will return, but I had to embark on some other writing, the kind rooted in this world, carved in the rock of my soul. All of it is important, all of it serious. I may never be read in textbooks but everything I’ve written, be it fantasy or memoir and everything in between, is no less important than the great literary pieces of the world. Those works, the “great American novels,” and the classics, they teach us about humanity as a whole, and that’s crucial. For me, writing has taught me about myself, it is the roadmap to my soul. I would be lost without it.