Writing Myself Back into Writing
The year was 1993. I’d recently moved back to Victoria after my first return to Ontario to attend college. I’d come west to do the same thing, five years earlier, straight out of high school and into The University of Victoria’s creative writing programme. Then, having been discouraged in a way that only an old boys’ club worth of first year writing instructors can offer a young woman full of passion and imagination, I went back home to question my direction. I mean, it only made sense, right? They told me I would fail. That the world of writing was fierce and competitive, and that most of us in that classroom would never get published, excepting one or two students who might go on to minimal success—provided they drank and got high to summon their muse. One teacher chose a submission each week to read aloud so we could laugh at it together, as a class, while the student whose work it was proceeded to redden, sweat and implode.
I stopped writing that year, and signed up to study massage therapy.
I have no regrets about this in the least; I chose wisely, at twenty years old, to take up this trade that sustains me to this day, and every hour I’m working, I get to make people feel better. Yet the desire to write, despite those instructors’ diligent efforts, had not been completely dashed out of me. I kept journaling; I kept reading; and every once in a while I’d wake up with an idea that had to come pouring out onto the page.
Then, eventually, back in Victoria with my crystal-wearing, tie-dye happy boyfriend, working in my chosen trade, I spotted an ad for a writing retreat on Galiano Island, promising gentleness and creative support. I took a deep breath, made the call, and signed myself over. And there, amid warm and generous strangers, at a place called Serenity by the Sea, with a view of arbutus and ocean, something happened.
At twenty-three, in that group of middle-aged seekers of one form or another, I wrote myself back into writing.
We wrote together, hour after hour, but the exercise that changed me was this: to write loosely, one sentence after another—intentional mayhem and disconnection—without stopping to edit. Something came loose in me, not just my writing, and my hand began to fly across the lines of my coil-bound notebook, unable to keep up with the brain’s dictation. I had no idea what I was doing—I was just doing it—and then, a la Natalie Goldberg’s popular method, I had to read what I’d just written aloud to everyone else in that nook-and-crannied living room.
I was shaking; I could barely decipher my handwriting. I read, and the room was silent, until a little wow came out of someone’s mouth. It might have been mine.
Poof! A tiny epiphany. A breakthrough. Even, a few tears: not at all because the work was moving—I think there was something about barrettes, a tiger, hoops of fire—but from relief.
I was writing again.
No wonder this Robert Frost quote is one I return to, often:
“No tears in the writer; no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer; no surprise in the reader.”
I’ve attained my writing education (and continue to attain it, because the learning never ends) in ways more suitable to me than a degree programme. It’s a mixed bag of influences: evening college courses, here and there; workshops at The BC Festival of the Arts and The Victoria School of Writing; under mentorship through both The Humber School for Writers and Banff’s Wired Writing Programme; reading widely in multiple genres; belonging to fabulous writing and critique groups; spending weeks in Mexico with carved-out time just to write and read; attending readings and lectures whenever I can; and finally, simply, no excuses, just writing (nearly) every day.
