by Amy Parker
“I am a writer, not an author,” I explained.
“Oh—what do you write?”
My voice began to shake as I tried to explain—nothing.
Every time this question is raised, I clam up. Normally a well-spoken individual, I cringe inside as my words get twisted up in my throat and I stutter, trying to wrangle them into something sensical. I shift my gaze away from the person—force myself to stand still when all I want to do is run screaming from the room or melt into the wall.
I have called myself a writer since I first discovered written words in a Sesame Street book about a monster at the end of the book. I remember my father rolling back each page and anticipation swelling inside of me as we snuck up on the last page. I even committed the book’s words to memory and lugged it around with my stuffed animals and blanky—situating them here and there in random makeshift classrooms throughout the house so I could tuck them in and read them all to sleep a million times a day waiting for him to come home from work.
Later on, someone, maybe a kindergarten teacher, opened a magic door in my mind and ushered me into the world of sounds and vowels and consonants and clusters, which gave me the power to read everything I could get my little hands around—out loud. When we were in the car and it was too dark to see, I read every road sign out loud, riding, looking, watching, and then blurting out as fast as I could before the sign disappeared. “Rest area two miles.” Or “Exit 183 Parker’s Crossroads.” Mother would jerk and shift in her seat and look with pleading, tired eyes at Dad, who would coax me to read the words in silence. I informed him that I was helping them by teaching myself how to talk better because I had read somewhere that children who read a lot communicate better. “Mmm, Lord, Lord,” my mother would say as she closed her eyes again. I might have been six.
I began to collect books from the yard sales my mother dragged me to every Saturday morning. Anything would do. I’d spend the rest of Saturday organizing, labeling, and listing them—creating a card catalogue before I ever knew there was such a thing.
When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said a lot of things. Most of all I wanted to be a cowboy. My mother assured me this was not possible but kindly informed me that I could be a cowgirl if I wanted. I wanted to be an astronaut, a scientist, a bug collector, a gymnast, a cheerleader, a musician. Other interests came and went as time unfurled—many different stages and phases, mostly rooted in the experiences I was having at the time of the asking.
I never told them I wanted to be a writer though. It was the V. C. Andrews collection that gave me human connection when my misguided older brother began sneaking in my room when I prematurely matured into a C cup overnight. I locked my secret career goals away with the shame.
I was eight when it began.
My love of books remained constant through the years. And whether I understood my soul’s cry or not back then, in the looking back forty years later I can clearly see a little girl with a heart’s desire to do nothing but build a life from the words that swirled around in her soul—desperate to wrap meaning around things that were unspeakable.
But I was in my late thirties before I ever sold an article.
Now I am 48, halfway through grad school, and having attended my daughter’s senior art show at the university she will graduate from in less than a month, I am confronted again with the question—this time by her favorite art professor, who just discovered that I’m a graduate student majoring in creative writing.
“So, what do you write?”
Nothing, Everything. That would’ve been the simple answer. But my mouth opens. I feel the lump in my throat. I hear the stuttering begin. I throw up the most socially awkward red flag possible and break eye contact—look down at my feet. Blood rushes to my face. But I take a mental deep breath and decide to power through.
And I just keep talking.
“I wrote my memoir three times: once from the gaping wound of my soul in my early twenties, and a second time with some rounder edges twenty years later from a more healed place . . .”
I cannot stop myself.
“I wrote it again as the fiction portion of my senior capstone in my undergraduate work and cried a lot in the wee hours of the morning as I retraumatized myself—a term I learned in the therapy that came afterward. My therapist says that one day it will appear like a picture on a wall that I can see but I’ll just keep walking by unbothered. I’m not altogether sure about that part, but I trust her wisdom, and that alone is progress . . .”
I’ve picked up speed now. God help me redeem myself.
“I wrote a memoir of a mission trip to Kenya for the nonfiction portion and then published it on Amazon KDP both as a reward to myself and as a fundraising tool that we used to help fund our pastor’s follow-up trip . . .”
Make it stop—anybody, please . . .
“I write mental-health articles when the notion hits me along with the time and the focus, but that trio doesn’t show up often.”
Emergency exit!! Take the emergency exit!
“So really, I guess the short answer is that I write whatever the course outlines tell me to, and that’s why I keep coming back to school and racking up all this student debt—because apparently I lack the discipline required to change my status from writer to author . . .”
His feet have shifted. His finger is on his lip now. Cut it off, cut it off. CUT. IT. OFF!
“So yeah . . . The question was ‘What do I write?’ A lot. I write a lot, but I write mostly for the classroom, and now that I’m standing here having this conversation, I’m answering a lot of questions for myself, like why I am still slaving away in graduate school writing papers for the classroom, but the really cool thing is that I finally have an answer to it. And though you didn’t ask, you’ve been so helpful to help me sort it all out that I think it’s only fair for me to share the answer with you . . .”
I don’t even stop to take a breath.
“You see . . .” Now my own finger is on my chin, and my gaze has returned to meet his face. “I’m sneaking up on the writer within. She thinks we’re getting a degree; I know I’m calling her forth and shaping her into something brave and fierce for a later time.”
Category: Featured, Nonfiction