“Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), German-Swiss novelist and Nobel Prize laureate, best known for Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and The Glass Bead Game.
Believe it or not, a week or so ago, the past rose up and slapped me across the face. No, it didn’t leave a bruise, but it left behind something I’m still thinking about.
The slap started when I walked into my office. At first glance, it looks impressive. The lamp casts a golden pool across my glass-top computer desk, giving the whole space a glow that almost convinces me I’ve got things under control. The Oriental rug circles wide and bold underfoot, all rich blues and reds that make the room feel grounded, important, and maybe even a little too proud of itself. Books and papers rise in uneven towers, but in that first glance, they seem less like clutter and more like credentials—proof that I’ve been busy living, working, collecting. Even the cows in the painting on the wall keep a calm eye on the scene, as if to say,
“Carry on, Mtn Prof. You’ve got this.”
But as I walk through the door, the illusion collapses. What looked like a tidy study becomes a landscape of leaning towers and stubborn archives. Books crowd tables in uneven stacks, some open, some shut tight, all demanding to be dealt with. Boxes huddle together on the floor, their labels promising order—but their bulging edges betray the lie. Folders spill their contents, paper curling like leaves that refuse to fall from the tree. A shirt slouches over the back of a chair, a plaid witness to resolve slipping into resignation.
Everywhere I turn, something insists on being noticed. Woven baskets perch on top of files, as if even the containers need containers. The desk is less a surface than a staging ground for half-made decisions. Another painting on the back wall gazes out of its pasture, unblinking, as though it’s been watching me circle this mess for years. It has. It’s not chaos exactly—it’s accumulation. Layer upon layer, a sediment of living, each piece waiting for me to finally decide whether it still belongs.
It isn’t permanent chaos. The boxes say as much, their sharp edges and taped seams hinting at better days ahead—days when decisions will be made, order restored, and space reclaimed. For now, it’s not just an office; it’s a staging area where the past collides with the present, where choices will shape the future. Every pile, every stack, every half-forgotten guidebook, and every dog-eared folder is here because I pulled it out of hiding and chose to face it. In that sense, the clutter is not failure but progress. It’s the visible proof that I’m reckoning with the past, one piece at a time.
I’ll continue to reckon, and I’ll keep on making progress. I know I will. But I know, too, that I can’t rid myself of a lifetime of artifacts in one day. Take the CDs, for instance. Three rows deep. Wedged into the lowest shelf of the floor-to-ceiling bookcase at the far end of the office. They’ve been squirreled away there for years. Waiting. Ralph Stanley leans against Sting, Nina Simone keeps company with Mahalia Jackson, and Susan Boyle dreams her dream right next to the Chuck Wagon Gang. It’s less a collection than a timeline—decades of moods, memories, and seasons pressed into plastic cases. But here’s the thing. I don’t have the heart to get rid of them in one fell swoop. And besides, maybe I don’t want to get rid of them all. Maybe I don’t need to get rid of them all. But I can’t hang on just to hang on. Each one becomes a decision. Which will serenade me today? Into the future? Which has already sung its last song?
Other choices are easier. Travel guides, for instance. Like Fodor’s Greece and Frommer’s Greece on $35 a Day. Both hopelessly outdated, their covers promising adventures I never took. They carry missed possibilities but not regret. Into the discard pile they go. Or the box of Library of Congress business cards, embossed with the proud gold seal of my past career. They once carried weight, proof of my role in the world’s premier library. Now? Nothing more than relics of a past identity. They go into the discard pile, too. The work, the years, the meaning, and the memories? They stay.
Other choices are so easy they’re no brainers. My Frost shelf, for instance: concordances, centennial essays, letters, the familiar black-and-green spines that have followed me across decades. They stay. The same goes for my Mary E. Wilkins Freeman books, lined up in their muted blues and browns. They’re not just books; they’re part of my scholarly DNA. No question, no hesitation. They stay.
Then there are some things whose fate I know as soon as my touch awakens forgottenness. My college copy of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, margins crammed with the notes of an eighteen-year-old who thought he already knew something about struggle. It stays. My copy of Gibran’s The Prophet, inscribed by a fraternity brother—a book I’ve carried long past the days of Greek letters and youthful certainties. It stays.
A three-by-five oil painting of the covered bridge in Philippi, West Virginia? It’s no masterpiece, but it hardly needs to be. I crossed those boards more times than I remember during my years at Alderson-Broaddus College, each passage a kind of bridge between my coal camp past and the life I was building in the present. The brushstrokes may be clumsy, the colors a bit too bright, but none of that matters. It stays.
A small stack of cassettes holds my mother’s voice on magnetic ribbon. One, dated 11/12/81, is labeled I Take a Stroll and Cause Worry among the Worry Warts. The cassettes may be obsolete, but her voice? Never. Alongside them rests the Bible she gave me when I left for college, her handwriting in the front marking it as mine, though I’ve always known it was hers first.
And the kettle bottom resting heavy on my desk—a flat, round stone that once fell from mine roofs where my father worked fifty years. In those seams, a kettle bottom was a miner’s dread, dropping without warning, too often killing the man beneath it. This one didn’t. My father walked away again and again, spared by chance or grace. These pieces stay—not for their weight, but for his, for hers, and for mine.
Tucked nearly into oblivion is a small 4-H patch from fourth grade, meant to be sewn onto a jacket I didn’t have. But I never needed the jacket to know the four H’s—head, heart, hands, health embroidered in me long before I understood mottos or mission statements. They shaped how I worked, how I cared, and how I learned to give myself to something larger. That patch will never leave me. Some things you don’t outgrow; they simply grow with you.
The things in my office are only the visible part of the past. The rest doesn’t sit on shelves—it lives in memory, in relationships, in faith, in regret, in longing. Those pieces weigh just as much, sometimes more. They, too, must be faced, not in sweeping generalizations, but one by one, moment by moment, decision by decision.
Because that’s how the past works. Even though we can’t erase it, we can’t carry all of it forward either. We have to make hard choices, keeping only what steadies us and letting go of the rest. That’s the only way we’ll have room for life to keep unfolding. Room for the present to breathe. Room for the future to arrive. Room to move forward without being smothered by what came before.
I’m glad the past slapped me across the face. It taught me what we all eventually learn: the only way to live fully in the present, and prepare for the future, is to reckon with the past—seen and unseen, tangible and intangible—piece by piece, choice by choice. The past, the present, and the future are never separate. They are one continuum of time. One long sorting. One steady choosing. One true becoming.
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
–Carl Sagan (1934–1996; astronomer and science communicator who inspired millions through his work on Cosmos and popular science writing.)
Tell me to do something, and I probably won’t do it. It smacks too much of being ordered around. No, thank you. Most of the time–though not always–I prefer to do the bossing.
On the other hand, suggest that I do something–maybe even challenge me to do something–and I’ll probably do it. Yes, thank you. I thrive on encouragement.
That’s exactly how today’s post began. One of my followers–my Linden Correspondent (LC)–suggested that the world at large might be revved and ready to know how my wired blog began! I thought LC’s suggestion was splendid, especially since my blog just celebrated its 12th anniversary. What better time than now to share the electrifying backstory.
With a growing readership of 13,782 (and counting!), I like to think my blog has found its niche. My readers value my blog for what it is today: a succession of riveting and captivating creative nonfiction essays that appear magically every Monday morning just in time for that first cup of coffee–that is for early risers who get their brew going early. That’s why I make a point of posting before 7am. While I sip on my coffee and savor what I wrote, I like to think that the entire world is doing the same thing.
Every Monday morning, you’ll find me in my reading chair with Ruby—my 60-pound lapdog—perusing my post while she peruses me. Sometimes, I smile and say aloud for her amusement:
“Wow, Kendrick! That’s a remarkable sentence. If you keep cranking out little gems like that, maybe one day you’ll end up somewhere as someone’s endnote.”
Yep. An endnote. Ironically, I guess that’s where we all end up: Someone’s endnote.
That’s not such a bad thing, you know. An endnote here. An endnote there. It seems to me that achieving a memorable, perhaps quotable phrase here and there is probably far wiser than having the entire canon of my work ricocheting around the world.
Stop and think about it for a minute or three. Look, for example, at what Benjamin Franklin achieved as a writer. Let’s focus on his Poor Richard’s Almanack, published annually from 1732 to 1758—nearly a quarter of a century of wit and wisdom.
Most people today can recall only a handful of Franklin’s most famous sayings, like:
● “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” ● “A penny saved is a penny earned.” ● “No gains without pains.”
Please tell me, Dear Reader, that you know those sayings, for if you don’t, you surely won’t know these:
● “Well done is better than well said.” ● “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” ● “If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.”
Indeed, Franklin managed to do both: he wrote things worth reading and did things worth writing. And, as I like to say:
“Endnoted.”
But let me take you back to where I began: the beginning of this blog.
I am so sorely tempted to say:
“It was a dark and stormy night …”
And that’s exactly what I would say, but if I said that I would have to note that Edward Bulwer-Lytton opened his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford with those words. As much as I hate to say it, because I am a stickler on documentation, I have grown weary of all the endnoting that I keep noting. Let us then move on to something that requires no noting.
Whew! I don’t know about you, but I feel notably relieved already.
LC must be relieved, too, to see that, at last, I’m getting around to sharing with the world the story behind the birth of my blog. But, as they say, every blog has its story, and mine is no exception.
Here’s what’s fascinating. Today, I am known around the world for my weekly memoir blog posts talking about anything from Aging to Zippers and about everything in between.
But when the idea for my blog came to me in 2012, I had a sharp, narrow, scholarly focus. I was working on my application for the VCCS Chancellor’s Commonwealth Professorship Program. At the heart of my application was the scholarly research that I wanted to do with a remarkable collection of Colonial American essays, songs, poems, and advertisements published pseudonymously under the name of “The Humourist” in the South Carolina Gazette during 1753-1754. The unique essays had never been reprinted, so they remained “hidden” and “undiscovered,” so to speak, in that newspaper. Further, no one knew who wrote the essays. Well, I was 99% certain that I knew, but I needed to do additional research and analysis to confirm my suspicions. In that sense, my project was a literary “whodunit” involving three things.
First, I planned to prepare a critical, annotated edition of the essays.
Second, I planned to develop a convincing case for authorial attribution based on a preponderance of internal evidence as well as on stylometrics.
Third, throughout the process of preparing the critical, annotated edition and developing a case for authorial attribution, I planned to give the essays a “close reading.” I was reminded of a quote by Robert Frost:
“We go to college to be given one more chance to learn to read in case we haven’t learned in high school. Once we have learned to read, the rest can be trusted to add itself unto us.”
I always shared that wisdom with my students. Learning to read—really read—gets to the heart of what we want our students to do, not just in English classes but across the board. When students slow down and give a text a close reading, critical thinking and intellectual discovery follow.
As Frost knew so well, that is what “learning to read” is all about. Further, when students learn how to really read, they can construct their own intellectual inquiries: “the rest can be trusted to add itself unto us.”
I always shared that belief—and approach—with my students without fail. I showed them how to learn to read, class after class, reading assignment after reading assignment, as I gave whatever literary selection we were reading my own close reading and as I made my own discoveries about a text. They were intrigued not only by my process but also by the discoveries that I made simply because of my dogged determination to give a text—any text—a close reading.
In my application, that’s precisely what I proposed to do with “The Humourist” essays. I wanted the opportunity to give the essays such a close reading that I would be able not only to establish a scholarly, annotated edition but also to identify the author.
I was really happy with that part of my application, but I knew that I needed something more. I needed a way to share my scholarly work on a regular basis with my colleagues and my students so that they could benefit, too.
I needed an idea. As I sat there on that January 8th evening, well into the third or fourth or maybe even fifth revision of my application, I started thinking about Daniel Boorstin (1975-1987), twelfth Librarian of Congress. A champion of accessibility, he worked to open the library to the public in symbolic and practical ways. He placed picnic tables and benches on Neptune Plaza, transforming it into a space for community gatherings. He initiated mid-day concerts and famously removed the chains from the majestic bronze doors at the first-floor west entrance leading to the Great Hall of the Jefferson Building. When told it would create a draft, he replied, “Great—that’s just what we need.” In a bold move, he even stopped the practice of searching visitors.
At that time, I worked at the Library of Congress as an editor of the National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints, and I well remember the occasion when the bronze doors were opened. If I am not mistaken, it was on this occasion that I heard Dr. Boorstin say:
“You never know when an idea is about to be born.“
His comment lingered, and since hearing it, I made a point to keep track of when my own ideas were born.
So it came to be. While thinking about Boorstin, ideas, and my project, I exclaimed to myself:
“Blog it!”
I knew that a blog would allow me to share with the entire world my challenges, discoveries, and joys of research.
I knew that a blog would allow me to share with others this remarkable collection of Colonial American essays, songs, poems, and advertisements. The Encyclopedia of the Essay (ed. Tracy Chevalier, 1997) placed “The Humourist” essays in the tradition of Samuel Johnson’s Rambler essays and observed that they are the only “full-fledged literary” works to have appeared in the South Carolina Gazette. Years earlier, J. A. Leo Lemay (du Pont Winterthur Professor of English at the University of Delaware) had noted in A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature (1969) that the essays should be edited, published, and the author identified.
This was hot! I knew that I could make “stuffy” literary research come alive in a blog. Colleagues and students and scholars and the world at large would love it. I knew they would because who wouldn’t love essays on par with Benjamin Franklin’s “Silence Dogood Letters”? Get this, too. Franklin had direct ties to the South Carolina Gazette and possibly to the author of “The Humourist” essays.
I knew, too, that aside from being in the essay tradition itself, a blog would allow me to share my project with faculty and students throughout the Virginia Community College System (VCCS), from the beginning of my work and every step of the way through completion. I realized that a blog would allow me to capture my personal experiences on a regular and ongoing basis: my work, my methods, my discoveries, my challenges and frustrations, and my joys.
I knew that a blog would allow me to do in the virtual world—using a heretofore unstudied literary work—exactly what I did in my classroom with literary works that appear in our textbooks: turn my blog followers on to the beauty of giving a text a close reading and turn them my on to “learning how to read,” showing them that once they learned how to read all else would be given to them.
That same evening, I came up with a working title: TheWiredResearcher. I Googled it and was delighted to discoverthatnosuchblog existed.
As I often do, I emailed a former student—a lover of language and words and ideas—to get her take on my blog idea.
She responded immediately:
The word “wired” will catch the attention of …The Young. They’ll think you are “hip.”
You’ll need a logo. You’ll need T-shirts with the logo on them. You need pens that say, “The Wired Researcher.” “Sold in libraries everywhere.” “Guaranteed to make study more exciting.” Oh, boy, I see tie-ins!
Clearly my former student was as wired as I was—perhaps that’s why I valued her opinions as highly as I did—but her email response gave affirmation to the title of the blog that had been born.
Here’s where the birth of the blog starts to get really sweet. I was awarded the Chancellor’s Commonwealth Professorship (2012-2014).
My first announcement appeared on October 19, 2012. It was short!
“Welcome to The Wired Researcher! Blog posts will begin on November 26, 2012.”
True to my promise, on November 26, I published “Opportunity Knocks Twice in the Virginia Community College System.” That post included the first of the historical essays that served as the nucleus for my project: “The Humourist” (November 26, 1753). Yep. Choosing to launch my blog on November 26, the same day that the Humourist launched his essays, was deliberate, and if I must say so myself, I think it was a stroke of genius!
And so, The Wired Researcher was born—not just as a blog, but as a way for me to share my love of research with a world eager to learn about my discoveries.
Now you have the inside scoop. If you want to know more, simply go back to the beginning and read all the posts from the start. But whatever you do, please make certain that you read “Colonial Charleston’s Biggest Literary Mystery Is Solved!” Yep. I solved the literary whodunit that captured me in the first place. Then you have to read “Three Special Shout-Outs!” because behind every success story are lots of people who deserve praise and thanks!
Wait! Wait! Don’t go yet. I have one or two more things to share.
When my blog started, I had around 1,750 views a year, representing 33 countries. So far this year, it has soared to an impressive 13,782 views from 152 countries! I must be writing something right!
To each and every one of you, My Dear Readers–then, now, and all along the way–a special shout-out!
To my Linden Correspondent (LC), who tossed out the idea that I share the story behind the blog, I extend asupercalifragilisticexpialidociousthank-you! (As Mary Poppins would say, nothing else captures the exuberance quite right!)
I look forward to a future of Mondays, inspired by the joy of discovery and by the connections that I’m making with all of you.
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”
–Joan Didion (1934-2021; renowned American Essayist and novelist whose distinctive writing style and introspective approach earned her a lasting place in contemporary literature).
Maintaining friendships can be a delicate dance, and I’ve learned that silence is golden when it comes to my own writing. My friends–especially those who are writers–know that I abide by Robert Frost’s sage counsel:
“Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second ” (Letter to Sydney Cox, 3January 1937; quoted in Robert Frost and Sidney Cox: Forty Years of Friendship. By William Richard Evans. 1981).
Rarely, then, do I talk with friends about what I’m writing in my weekly blog posts. Talking about it diminishes my focus and my belief. Oh, to be certain, I may tease by divulging a topic or a working title. I love teasing. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again right now by telling you the working titles of some future posts:
● “What My Father Saw.”
● “Packin’ Up. Gettin’ Ready to Go.”
● “My Right to Know.”
● “Somewhere Called Home.”
● “What If Artificial Intelligence (AI) Makes Us Even Better than We Are?”
● “Grappling with Unknowns.”
● “The Cake Stops Here.”
● “When Did Tomorrow Begin?”
See there. I didn’t mind sharing those titles at all. Like I said, I’m a tease.
Truth be told, though, that’s all that I can share in advance because I’m clueless as to how those tentative titles will play out. I never know the end of a post until it leads me to its ending.
Clearly, I am not one of those writers–of whom there are many–who align themselves with Edgar Allan Poe. I’m thinking now about his focus on “unity of effect” and that a writer must know the intended effect from the beginning:
[…] in almost all classes of composition, the unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance. […] If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design (Poe’s review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, Graham’s Magazine, May 1842).
A few years later, he reiterated that point:
Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention (“The Philosophy of Composition,” Graham’s American Monthly Magazine, April 1846).
Poe’s way of writing is not my way of writing. Mine is just the opposite. Mine is the Frostian way:
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it (“The Figure a Poem Makes,” Atlantic Monthly, June 1939).
I am not trying to compare my writing to Frost or to Poe. Yet, as a writer, I have every right to align my methods with someone. I choose Frost for alignment, and I choose Frost for ally.
Like Frost, I am unwilling to talk about the content of what I am writing: opening the hydrant [talking] lessens the pressure on the upstairs faucet [writing]. At the same time, I am more than willing to talk about my writing methods: melting like a piece of ice on a hot stove, carrying me away with it.
Actually, I have talked about my writing process extensively in several blog posts. I’m tempted to suggest that you browse my posts and find them for yourself. But that would be mean spirited. So let me recap the main points here.
1. I write my posts in bed–every day, seven days a week–starting at 8:00 pm and continuing until I decide to stop, usually around 9:30 pm or so. Sometimes, I ignore my body’s call for rest, and I write until 11:00 pm. I don’t think that I’ve ever written past 11:30 pm. (However, I do recall writing until 12:30 am once, just to prove to a friend that I could stay up that late.)
2. I write my blog posts exclusively on my smartphone. Yes. On my smartphone. I hold it in my left hand (as I am doing now), and I touch type my text, letter by letter, with the index finger of my right hand (as I am doing now). I know: it’s slow. I know: it’s tedious. But guess what? It works.
3. I write my blog posts while sipping on a Bunnahabhain Scotch, neat.
4. I have a large number of drafts in progress at any given time: everything that I experience is copy. Right now, for example, I have 29 drafts in various stages of development.
5. Whenever I have an idea and start a draft, I develop it enough so that I can leap back into the idea whenever I return to it, even if it’s weeks or months after the idea leapt into my head.
6. Usually, one draft among all the others calls to me and demands my attention. I listen. I focus on it for seven nights, hanging on tight and never letting go.
7. On Sunday of each week–the day before publishing a post–I read it out loud by telephone to my oldest sister, Audrey. Reading it aloud gives me the opportunity to find any remaining mistakes. (Inevitably, I still miss a few.) More importantly, however, it gives me the opportunity to hear the rhythm, and if I have an off-key passage, my ear speaks to me. Sometimes, I pick up on a rhythm, and I decide to play it more fully in one final revision before going to bed. But here’s the important thing: it’s the hearing aloud–what Frost would call the “sound of sense–that allows me to know my degree of accomplishment.
Those are the main steps that I follow in writing my posts.
Recently, however, I noticed a recurring practice that I’ve been unintentionally following. Let me share it with you.
As I open a draft, I revisit the beginning instead of scrolling down to where I left off the night before. This practice offers a fresh perspective on my words and ideas.
I circle back to the beginning, I start from there, and the Frostian melt starts anew.
As I circle back, I take my time. I savor every word. I savor every nuance. I savor all the possibilities, including the white space between words where so many meanings live–and hide. And, as I circle back, I change whatever it is that calls to be changed.
To be sure, circling back flies in the face of the process that I and other English professors are hell-bent on teaching our students. Generally, we teach a straightforward, linear process without much room for deviation, except for an occasional reminder that writing can be recursive, especially when we need to do additional research to strengthen content. The process that we teach goes something like this:
First. Prewriting (Topic, Audience, Brainstorming, Research, Thesis, and Outlining).
Second.Drafting (Creating an initial version).
Third.Revising (Reconsidering content and context).
Fourth. Editing (Looking at grammar and mechanics).
Fifth.Proofreading (Taking a final look to discover mistakes, including formatting).
Undoubtedly, the 5-step method works, especially for beginning writers who often have no method.
It works for seasoned writers, too, but as we gain more and more writing experience, we follow that method subconsciously. For example, even though I write my posts in bed, I’m well aware that whatever I’m working on is simmering on my writer’s back burner throughout the day and throughout the night as I sleep. My ideas and insights come unexpectedly and without invitation.
For me, then, as a writer–especially a writer of Creative Nonfiction Essays like my blog posts–I’m tapping into the tried and tested steps of the writing process, but I’m really unaware that I’m doing so.
Yet, I am exceedingly aware of my circling back, and I find that keen awareness fascinating. It’s a conscious choice that I make every night when I open my WordPress draft to pick up where I left off. The starting point is always same: I circle back to the beginning. Most nights, I spend half of my writing time revisiting, rethinking, and modifying what I’ve written already.
I’m not suggesting that the “circling back” part of my writing strategy is revolutionary or unique. Perhaps lots of writers circle back in like manner.
What I am suggesting, however, is this: Circling back becomes a dance of words, a waltz with sentences that have already found their footing. It’s a writer’s serenade to their own creation, a harmonious echo of ideas that resonates and refines. Circling back is an invitation to linger in the labyrinth of language, to savor the richness of thinking, and to let the journey unfold in its own enchanting way. In the quiet act of returning to the starting point, I find my path illuminated by the wisdom of Frost and by the freedom of my narrative.
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy!
Robert Burns (1759-1796; considered to be the National Poet of Scotland; from his “To a Mouse”)
Without a doubt, you’re familiar with the poetic lines, “The best laid schemes of mice and men often go astray,” even if you don’t know that Robert Burns penned them.
The lines express a universal truth. Yet, many people have trouble accepting it. Or, maybe, they simply have trouble admitting it when their meticulous plans go awry, sometimes dreadfully so.
Down through the years, it’s happened to me so often that I can accept the poem’s truth readily. More important, I don’t mind admitting it when my best-laid plans flop.
My recent trip to Vermont is a perfect example. I planned it way back in March, just as soon as I knew that my edition of Green Mountain Stories would be launched in Burlington on May 25 and again in Brattleboro on May 30.
I decided that it could also be a much-needed vay-kay for me and my dog Ruby.
But let me ask you this. Have you ever gone on a 10-day road trip with your furry, four-legged best friend, alone with no other person traveling with you?
If so, you know already what I had to learn the hard way: it’s not really your road trip. It’s your dog’s. As I made my careful plans, it became obvious to me that everything was being built around Ruby’s needs:
● How far could she ride in a day?
● Would the hotel mid-way up and mid-way back accept a dog?
● Would the VRBO home rental in Burlington accept a dog? What about a yard so that Ruby could play?
● Would the VRBO home rental in Brattleboro accept a dog? What about a yard so that Ruby could play?
Those were my big concerns. I won’t bother you with the small ones because just a few days before my trip, my best-laid plans fell apart.
It became clear to me, to Ruby, and to our veterinarian that she would be happier staying at a pet spa rather than staying stressed out for such a long trip.
By then, it was too late to change any of my lodging arrangements. The cancellation windows had closed.
● Yeah. It would have been great to stay in swanky downtown hotels and walk to restaurants and nightspots.
● Yeah. It would have been great to fly to Vermont. Or, maybe, drive to DC’s Union Station and journey by Amtrak.
But those options were never part of my Rubyesque best-laid plans. Now it was too late. Fine. I knew that the book launches would go well. As for the rest of the road trip without Ruby, I was determined to make the most of the situation.
At that point, I had no great expectations. None. But that was okay, too. Sometimes life gets better when we expect less. And so it came to be on this trip. My serendipitous encounters took me far greater distances than the distance I would travel. Let me share a few with you.
By the time that I reached Hazelton, PA–three hours or so from my home in Edinburg, VA, driving North on I-81–it was as if I had stepped back into early Spring. The forest canopy was see-through thin, and the leaves were so small, so new, so filled with promise that I immediately started reciting to myself, aloud, for no one else was around to hear, Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay”:
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief. So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
I love that poem on so many levels, not the least of which is knowing how much effort Frost put into revising it. It didn’t spring into existence as the exquisite 8-line octave that we know. The revision history of the poem–even my sketchy recollection of it–fascinates me because Frost maintained that he did not revise his poems a lot. Here’s how he put it:
A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and having carried the poet with it (“The Figure a Poem Makes,” Collected Poems, 1939).
Frost might disagree, but it seems to me that he worried “Nothing Gold Can Stay” into existence. Let me explain. It started out as three octaves, for a total of 24 lines. More important, the original title was “Nothing Golden Stays.” Well, hello. Duh! Of course, nothing golden stays. Golden is a characteristic. It’s not the real thing.
But after four or five needed revisions, Frost distilled 24 poetic lines into the 8 that we enjoy today, and he changed golden to gold, knowing fully well that if nothing gold can stay we had all damned well better sit up and take notice, especially considering that even Eden sank to grief.
I could go on and on about this poem, but if I do, I’ll not be able to share other parts of my road trip that exceeded expectations. I had better put the pedal to the metal.
Wow! Two asphalt-hours are in my rear-view mirror, I didn’t get a speeding ticket, and I’ve reached my trip’s mid-way destination, headed north: a hotel in Johnson City, NY.
Approaching the city, I was thrilled beyond expectations to see a sign: HOME OF DAVID SEDARIS. Sedaris is one of my favorite writers, yet I had no idea that he was from Johnson City. Imagine that! And here I was sleeping … right in his … home … town. That’s almost downright sultry.
I’ve known Sedaris–not personally but rather as a humorist, comedian, and author–for decades, going all the way back to 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay “Santaland Diaries.” I have always appreciated and enjoyed his self-deprecating humor, his candor about growing up gay in middle-class America in the late Sixties and the early Seventies, and his open-and-oft-written-about commitment to his long-time partner Hugh Hamrick. Hamrick has a few things to say about their relationship, too: “Hugh Hamrick—David Sedaris’ Boyfriend—Finally Tells His Side of Their Story.”
After I got settled in my Johnson City hotel room, I decided that I’d spend the evening in bed with Sedaris. (Re-reading some of his essays on my all-time favorites list.)
It was a “wild night, wild night.“ (Of reading.) I awakened the next morning refreshed and ready to continue my journey.
Not long after leaving Johnson City, I saw signs announcing that I was in New York State’s Southern Tier. I’m not sure why, but I always chuckle when I see those Southern Tier signs. But my laughter subsided as I started seeing birch trees everywhere, as far as I could see. And I immediately thought of Robert Frost’s poem, “Birches,” but since I have written extensively about that poem already in my “A Swinger of Birches,” I will say no more about the poem here except to quote its opening lines:
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
An hour or so later, I started seeing signs for Cooperstown, NY. It goes without saying that I fully expected to see a sign: HOME OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. I had every right to have that expectation since the town was named after the Cooper family, since Cooper was America’s first novelist to earn his living as a writer, and since Cooperstown and the surrounding frontier served as the backdrop for The Pioneers, the first of five novels in his Leatherstocking Tales.
I did not see the sign that I had expected. Instead, I saw signs announcing Cooperstown as Home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. It’s too bad that Cooper’s hometown doesn’t consider him to be a Major League player.
An hour or so later, I approached Saratoga Springs, NY. I was ecstatic. Saratoga Springs. The setting for most of the action in Sherwood Anderson’s famous rite-of-passage short story “I Want to Know Why.”
But about Saratoga. We was there six days and not a soul from home seen us and everything came off just as we wanted it to, fine weather and horses and races and all. We beat our way home and Bildad gave us a basket with fried chicken and bread and other eatables in, and I had eighteen dollars when we got back to Beckersville. Mother jawed and cried but Pop didn’t say much. I told everything we done except one thing. I did and saw that alone. That’s what I’m writing about. It got me upset. I think about it at night. Here it is.
How’s that. The unnamed fifteen-year-old narrator goes back home and tells his parents everything that happened in Saratoga except for the one thing that he “did and saw alone.”
What he doesn’t tell his parents is the passion and love that he feels for Jerry Tilford, a horse trainer. What he doesn’t tell his parents is what he saw Tilford doing in a farmhouse with a “bad woman.” What he doesn’t tell his parents is how he felt about Tilford when he saw what he saw:
Then, all of a sudden, I began to hate that man. I wanted to scream and rush into the room and kill him. I never had such a feeling before. I was mad clean through and I cried and my fists were doubled up so my finger nails cut my hands.
The story ends the next spring with the narrator, nearly sixteen, still wanting to know why Jerry Tilford did what he did. I suspect that the narrator spent his entire life being upset by his feelings and by Jerry’s actions. I suspect that the narrator spent his entire life wondering why things didn’t work out as he hoped they would work out.
It’s one of the most haunting stories about coming-of-age, sexual desire, and rejection that you can ever hope to read. Anderson deals with the topic far more overtly in his story “The Man Who Became a Woman.” After you read that story, you simply must read Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919). It’s an overlooked classic in American literature.
Two hours or so later, I reached my first book-launch destination: Burlington, VT. I am embarrassed to say that even though I love Ben & Jerry’s Ice-Cream, I had no idea that Burlington has been its home since 1978 when they started dishing it out. Today, it’s still their home, with 282 million pints of deliciousness churned annually.
After Burlington, I headed south to Brattleboro for a second launch of Green Mountain Stories. Obviously, I need not remind you that Mary E. Wilkins Freeman–the author of Green Mountain Stories–launched her career in Brattleboro.
What else can I share about Brattleboro that might exceed your expectations?
Royall Tyler, America’s first playwright whose The Contrast(1787) still enjoys theatrical productions, moved to Brattleboro in 1801 and is buried there in Prospect Hill Cemetery.
Then, of course, we have Rudyard Kipling, English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist, known for being the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1907). What most folks don’t know is that he married Caroline Balestier of Brattleboro in 1892, moved there–initially living in Bliss Cottage where he wrote The Jungle Book(1894)–and then built Naulakha, which is on the Landmark Trust USA. What even fewer people know is that Freeman met Kipling in the Spring of 1892, on one of her return visits to Brattleboro. Later, she wrote to a friend:
The spell of Ruddy’s eyes have faded away, but my heart still clings to the coupe driver. (Letter 111 to Evelyn Sawyer Severance, The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, ed. with Biographical/Critical Introductions by Brent L. Kendrick. Scarecrow, 1985.)
And what almost no one knows is that Saul Bellow–acclaimed Canadian-American Nobel Laureate in Literature and author of such noteworthy novels as Dangling Man (1944), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), and Henderson the Rain King (1959)–lived in Brattleboro for the last 26 years of his life and is buried there in the Shir He Harim Jewish Cemetery section of Morningside Cemetery.
The morning after my Brattleboro book launch, I started the long drive back home. I intended it to be a straight shot on interstates. Somehow–accidentally, I should add–my Gladiator’s Navigation System was programmed to AVOID HIGHWAYS. And I was programmed to DON’T THINK. I just kept right on going down one country back road after another, paying them nary no mind whatsoever. After all, I was getting an up-close-and-personal view of Vermont’s Green Mountains.
The next thing I knew, I was approaching Ulster, NY, with signs announcing HEADLESS HORSEMAN HAYRIDES AND HAUNTED HOUSES. Oh. My. God. How the hell did I end up in the Lower Catskills where folks still scare themselves with Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820).
Suffice it to say, I had given myself my own fright. Immediately, I adjusted my Navigation System, got back on my intended route, settled in to Cruise Control, and clicked my boots together three times, saying “There’s no place like home.”
Before I knew it, I had picked up Ruby from the pet spa. As I drove back up my mountain road, I shared with her brief highlights of my road trip beyond expectations. But as soon as I saw our house, I stopped my storytelling and shouted:
Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.
Andy Goldsworthy (b. 1956; English sculptor, Photographer, and environmentalist.)
Call me weird if you want. But I love weather. All kinds of weather. Hot. Cold. Rainy. Dry. Foggy. Sunny. Overcast.
Call me weird again, if you want. But I love all kinds of storms, too. Thunderstorms. Lightning storms. Hailstorms. Windstorms Snowstorms. When a storm is headed my way, I get hyped up and worked up, simply anticipating the maybeness and the mightiness. The storm’s arrival–assuming that it actually arrives–always brings an intense level of energy, inner and outer, that thrills me.
I love surprises, too. Yep. I’m betting that you guessed it. Surprise storms thrill me most, especially surprise snowstorms. Ask my family. Ask my friends. Ask my neighbors. Ask my former colleagues. I’m a snow freak. I get turned on by snow, but not those puny dustings of just a few inches. Take it up to six or seven or eight, and then we’re talking. Take it up to nine or more and my wild side comes alive, especially if it’s a surprise. OMG! Life is grand. Once, while living right here on my mountain, I had the hellacious thrill of being stranded in a surprise 40-inch snowfall in the middle of March. Actually, it was closer to 50 inches. The more that I think about it, though, I am convinced that it was 54 inches.
My West Virginia kin contemplated calling the National Guard to rescue me. (Hmm. That might have been fun.) But a local contractor bulldozed me to freedom first. The snowbanks were so tall that they didn’t melt until June. Now that’s a surprise storm that I will always remember. Perhaps I will write about it one day. But not today.
For today, I’m just wondering how many, if any, surprise snowstorms we will have this winter. I remember more than a few down through the years, but right now I’m thinking about two surprise snowstorms that were real and a third surprise storm–an ice storm–that the power of poetry made come alive for me, so much so that it seems as real now as it did then.
All three are memorable, profoundly so, though for different reasons.
All three took place when I was a kid growing up in the coalfields of Southern West Virginia where snowstorms were plentiful.
The earliest that lingers in my mind was when I was really young. I’m guessing that it was the winter of 1951, when I would have been four. My mother had to get something from the church that she pastored, hardly more than a stone’s throw below our home. She had no sooner walked out the door than she rushed back in, smiling all radiant like:
“Let’s put your coat and hat on so that you can see the snow. It’s in color!”
We hurried out behind the house, taking her usual shortcut path to the church. I could see my mother’s tracks in the snow where she had walked minutes earlier. But everything was white. All white.
“Where’s the colored snow? I don’t see any.”
“Come on. You’ll see. We’re almost there.”
We continued on the path, meandering down and around a knoll. On the gentle downslope, we narrowed our way between two large, weather-worn boulders.
We stopped there. My mother turned toward the boulders, exclaiming in triumphant joy:
“Look! Look at all the colors!”
I looked, and I was amazed. Vast patches of colored snow covered the boulders. Reds. Greens. Blues. Browns. Some of the flakes were colored as they fell from the sky. Other flakes turned color when they touched the boulders.
Years later I learned that the boulders were probably covered with types of algae that caused the white snow to change color. The snow that came falling down in color was caused by pollutants, no doubt from the coal camp where we lived. The science, though, never eroded the beauty of that snowfall. I had never seen colored snow before, and I have never seen colored snow since. It is as if my mother and I shared a magical moment never to be witnessed again.
The second surprise snow came when I was older. I’m guessing that it was 1961 when I was a high-school freshman. It fell in October. Green leaves, still on the trees, had not even thought of turning red or gold.
The wet, heavy snow started during the night. A significant amount had fallen by the time my dad got up for work. Not one to be daunted easily, he set out in the early pre-daylight hours, trudging through the deep snow, determined to catch his ride to the coal mines. I can still see the flicker of his carbide lantern as it swayed beneath the towering oak tree where he always stood, waiting for his ride to work. I can still see him standing there, the carbide lantern swaying. I can still see the snow falling, piling up higher and higher. I can still see what seemed to be forever.
And, then, forever turned into daylight. My dad’s ride didn’t show up because the snow was too deep. My dad slogged his way back home.
The door had hardly closed when we could hear him in the kitchen rattling pots and pans as he started making biscuits, frying country ham, and cracking eggs, whistling and singing in his untrained country way. Looking back, I understand his carefree merriment. He would have been 59 that year and that day was probably his first coal-miner’s snow day ever. If he had others, he never mentioned them. I know for a fact that he never had another work snow day afterwards.
That snowfall was more than 25 inches. Branches fell. Trees crashed. But what lingers most for me is the magical snow-day breakfast that my dad prepared–one that we all shared, never to be spread again.
The next surprise storm–the one that I experienced through the power of poetry–came in 1955, betwixt and between the other two.
I was in the third grade and my teacher, Marie Massie, introduced me–just me, not the entire class–to Robert Frost. She pulled me aside one day and gave me a mimeographed copy of his poem “Birches.”
“I think you’ll like this poem. Let me know.”
I fell in love with the poem and told her so. She gave me more: Frost’s essay “The Figure a Poem Makes.”
Looking back, I cannot help but wonder why. Why did she give me, a third grader, a poem with such profound meanings? Why did she proceed to give me, a third grader, an essay, profounder still?
I’d like to think that it was because she knew that she was dealing with an unusual intelligence. But I know better. She wasn’t.
Of course, “Birches” spoke to every fiber of my being. I, the child, who loved storms. I, the child, who loved surprises. I, the child, who played alone. All that it took was a description of birch trees in winter:
[ … ] Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
I had never seen a birch tree nor had I ever seen an ice storm. But I had seen colored snow, and in my mind’s eye I could easily imagine what the sky–heaven’s inner dome–would look like if it froze and fell around the forest trees where I played with great abandon.
More, though, I became one with the boy mentioned in the poem:
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do.
Indeed, I often climbed saplings near our home, learning quickly how far up the tree to shimmy before thrusting my feet outward into the air, letting the tree dip me down to the ground and lift me back up again, heavenward, to repeat by dipping me down to the ground on the other side and lifting me back up again, heavenward. Over and over and over. Earth. Heaven. Earth.
But as the poem teaches us, trees are never bent forever when a boy swings them. They always right themselves. But that’s not the case when the forces of nature–ice storms–bend trees:
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves
The key phrase, of course, is “they never right themselves.” The damage brought on by Nature is irreparable
As an eight-year-old, I am confident that I did not pick up on the sobering seriousness of that caution, even after I continued reading and came across the lines:
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth a while
And then come back to it and begin over.
Looking back, I cannot help but wonder whether my third-grade teacher had experienced being weary of considerations, wishing to get away from earth for a while.
Looking back, I cannot help but wonder whether my third-grade teacher was giving me a caution that I, too, would have days when I would be weary of considerations and would wish to get away from earth for a while.
Maybe she was doing both. To live is to grow weary from time to time. To live is to wish to get away from earth for a while. To be human is to suffer.
But, maybe, while she was hoping to impress upon me those life-lessons, she was hoping still more that I would latch on to, hold on to, and believe in the next few lines:
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
Of course, we all want to get away from earth from time to time, but, at the same time, we all want to come back to earth. We don’t want our getaway to be our final exit.
But there’s something in those lines that makes the occasional skeptic in me laugh. Is earth the right place for love, especially considering all of the cruelties that we inflict on ourselves, on humankind, and on Planet Earth, our home? If we come down on the side that Earth is not always the right place for love, then all of us–collectively and individually–need to look for ways that we might–collectively and individually–make Earth the right place for love, for all, forever.
I suspect that Frost wants to nudge readers toward those more serious reflections.
For today–and today only–I’ll put aside the poet’s nudge.
For today, I’ll put aside my sometimes-skeptical self.
For today, it’s enough for me to recall my mother’s love as she shared with me the magic of colored snow.
For today, it’s enough for me to recall my father’s love when a sudden snowstorm gave him the only snow day of his work life, and he chose to make a magical breakfast.
For today, it’s enough for me to recall the teacher who gifted me with my love of poetry.
For today, it’s enough for me to recall my own childhood days when I, too, was an innocent swinger of birches.
“If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”
Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard’s Almanac)
This week I’m thinking about education, far more than usual. The reason is simple. Exactly one week from today, I’ll be meeting a new group of community college students who have decided wisely that getting an education is their best move. With them, I’ll be standing on the brink of now and the future. It’s a new beginning for me and a new beginning for them.
As an educator, my role is to provide students with the knowledge base they need in English, especially American Literature, Appalachian Literature, and Creative Writing.
Aside from equipping them with the needed knowledge base, my goal is to turn them on.
“Turn students on to English? No way!”
“When pigs fly,” someone else squealed.
I understand. I have understood since I started teaching. From the first day that I enter a classroom at the start of a brand-new semester, mine is an uphill battle. But that’s perfectly all right. I love challenges. I have every confidence in the world that by the end of the semester my students will see that language and literature can help them discover their own worlds and the worlds around them. I have every confidence in the world that by the end of the semester my students will see that language and literature matter. “He can inspire a rock to write,” wrote one student in my early teaching career at Laurel Ridge Community College.
Nonetheless, I am aware that I may not have one student who is majoring in English. So, while I am passionate about language and literature and while I know that I can turn my students on to those subjects, I feel an equal responsibility to be passionate about education. I want my students to believe that education–their education–matters.
Sometimes getting them to believe that is an even greater challenge than turning them on to English.
I have to meet that challenge, too, right from the start, because I know that the community college graduation rate nationwide is about 62%.
I celebrate the students who make up that percentage. And I celebrate the 30% of community college students nationwide who transfer to four-year colleges and universities.
Yet, while celebrating all those students, I want to do my best to reach out to the others who might not be part of the 62% graduation rate or the 30% transfer rate unless I convince them that an education–their education–matters.
Why an education matters is abundantly clear to those of us who are educated. Career options. Job security. Expanded earnings. Networking. Professional connections. Increased happiness. Friendships. Better health. Even longevity.
I could include statistics to support those claims. I won’t. Candidly, they don’t do much for me.
And, candidly, when I talk about the practical benefits of an education–and I do–eyes glaze over and my students search for imaginary exits, especially when I start bringing in statistics to support my claims.
On the other hand, when I switch my focus to the softer side of why an education matters–the side that allows me to be personal and passionate–vision returns to glazed eyes and students return to the classroom that they just fancifully exited.
Sometimes–actually almost always–I’ll start the soft-side conversation by asking my students how many of them are the first in their family to go to college.
Usually about one third of their hands go up–a response that’s consistent with national data for community college students.
They seem to take notice when I tell them that I am a first-generation college student, too. They really take notice when I share some personal information about me. Son of a West Virginia coal miner and his wife, a Pilgrim Holiness minister. Grew up with three books in my home—the King James Bible, Webster’s Dictionary, and Sears Roebuck Catalog. Made it to the halls of the Library of Congress, which for 25 years became my home, with more than 20 million books. Then to the halls of Laurel Ridge Community College which for the last 23 years has been my home, where I’ve taught more than 7,000 students. Without being boastful, I want them to hear and see firsthand how an education transformed my life. I want to convince them that an education will transform their lives, too.
They get turned on more when I tell them that with an education they can go anywhere because they will be experts in their field. These days, I seem to have more and more students in health sciences, so I make a point of emphasizing that they can go wherever their credentials are recognized. Their eyes light up when I talk about the option of being a traveling nurse or a traveling surgical technologist. Their eyes really light up when I talk about the bonuses and salary increases that go hand in hand with adventuresome, free travel.
I remind them as well that an education empowers them to become their own knowledge navigators. I share with them what Robert Frost once wrote: “We go to college to be given one more chance to learn to read in case we haven’t learned in High School. Once we have learned to read the rest can be trusted to add itself unto us” (“Poetry and School,” The Atlantic Monthly, June 1951). Frost, of course, is talking about developing critical reading skills and critical thinking skills, both at the heart of all education.
Some days I emphasize that an education matters because it emboldens you to follow your passion. I share with them my own undergraduate struggles as English, Pre-Law, and Pre-Med messed around with my head. One day, after switching majors several times, I allowed my passion to take hold of my heart. From that point forward, English prevailed.
Or what about the notion that an education enables us to be anchored and hopeful amidst the storms of life that are certain to come our way? I’m thinking again about Robert Frost and his poem “One Step Backward Taken.” The speaker in the poem is shaken by a universal crisis, “But with one step backward taken / I saved myself from going. / A world torn loose went by me. / Then the rain stopped and the blowing, / And the sun came out to dry me.”
And how about this one that I like to use when students wonder whether an education is worth the cost, especially as their student loans grow larger and larger. I remind them that an education is one of their best investments. No one can take it away, ever. Perhaps even better is the way that the investment keeps on growing through lifelong learning.
Those are just a few of the “soft” reasons why an education matters to me. They are the ones that are on my mind this week as I anticipate next week’s new beginnings.
There’s one more, though, that’s always on my mind. It’s the University of South Carolina’s motto surrounding the seal on my doctoral class ring. It’s a quote from Ovid, “Emollit Mores Nec Sinit Esse Feros,” which translates to “Learning humanizes character and does not permit it to be cruel.”
We are always yapping about the “Good Old Days” and how we look back and enjoy it, but I tell you there is a lot of hooey to it. There is a whole lot of our past lives that was not so hot.
–Will Rogers (1879-1953; American Vaudeville Performer, Actor, and Social Commentator)
Hey, everyone! Listen up! Make certain that you keep a copy of this post in a safe, virtual folder. Maybe even the Cloud. It is destined for fame. It is destined for greatness. It is destined for glory. It will go down in the annals of history as the most historic and historical blog post ever published.
You will discover why as you continue to read. But let me start with one reason and that one reason alone will earn this post its deserved historical distinction. For the first time in my life, I am at a loss for words. I am. My students would be thrilled beyond thrills because they consider me to be exhaustive and, no doubt, exhausting when I start talking about anything that is near and dear to my heart.
One of my eccentricities that I felt comfortable sharing was the fact that I had drafted the general introduction and the introductions to the five sections of my The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman on yellow legal pads, using #2 pencils without erasers. The really quirky part of that eccentricity was that whenever I made a mistake, I ripped out the page and started over.
One of my faithful followers challenged me to write my next post on a yellow legal pad, using a #2 pencil, and to share with you what happened as I wrote. Dear reader, you are so undeserving of the suffering that you will surely suffer as you continue to read. But please do continue to read. Remember: no pain, no gain. (Because I love you so much–whoever you are and wherever you are [including you, Mrs. Callabash, wherever you are]–I have timed the read-time for this post. You are now 6 minutes and 36.3 seconds away from full fatigue and brain drain.)
It was a commendable challenge, so much so that I really should quote it verbatim, and I would, but I can’t. I am lying in bed writing my post on a legal pad, using a #2 pencil, as challenged–I am such a sucker for challenges–so I don’t want to lose my grain of thought by switching over to my Smartphone to look at last week’s post so that I can quote the comment in its entirety the way that it deserves to be quoted.
Therefore, starting with the next paragraph I will use placeholders for anything that I would normally have the good sense to look up instanter on my Smartphone. I will use this placeholder convention throughout this post. My very first one follows.
Placeholder for When I Return to My Sanity and My Smartphone: Insert faithful reader quote from last week. I believe the reader signed herself “J.”
I responded to “J’s” challenge by asking whether yellow legal pads were even manufactured these days. I noted that if they had fallen out of usage, not to worry: I had seen such writing artifacts at the Smithsonian Institution and, perhaps, I could arrange for a Docupost: Modern Applications of Ancient Writing Artifacts.
My reply to “J.” was far more brilliant than it appears here, but, again, I can’t easily switch over to my Smartphone.
Placeholder for When I Return to My Sanity and My Smartphone: Insert my dazzling reply to “J.” Make sure to capture the correct title of the Docupost that I plan to propose to the Smithsonian Institution.
Not long after “J’s” comment, another faithful follower–“soyfig”–informed me that she had some yellow legal pads and #2 pencils that I could have.
Placeholder for When I Return to My Sanity and My Smartphone: insert “soyfig’s” actual comment, especially since, as I recall, she used some figurative language.
I responded, of course. I respond to everything, seen and unseen, heard and unheard. But, sadly, I do not remember my exact reply, but I am sure that it was a beauty.
Placeholder for When I Return to My Sanity and My Smartphone: Insert my beauty-of-a-reply to “soyfig” who writes so figuratively.
Obviously, I accepted the challenge because, as I noted earlier, here I am writing about what it’s like writing a blog post on a yellow legal pad, using a #2 pencil, while lying in bed.
I should be euphoric, I suppose, because I am certain–and history will confirm my certainty–that what I am developing right here and right now is a new Creative Nonfiction genre. To mirror its counterpart in the world of fiction, I hereby announce–with all the power and authority that is not vested in me–that this new genre will be dubbed CreativeMetaNonfiction.
Placeholder for When I Return to My Sanity and My Smartphone: Check the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to see whether the word and the genre exist already. If not, notify the editors immediately. “by gorry by jingo by gee by gosh by gum,” fame awaits.
I believe that I have said so already, but I will say so again: writing my post on this yellow legal pad, using a #2 pencil, is not making me euphoric. I can’t speak for you, but I can speak for me. My bed is a place of immense pleasure. Trust me. This is not pleasurable. I’ve got a stupid yellow legal pad–six times larger than my Smartphone–propped up on my knobby knees and the stupid pencil does not have the same quality graphite that I recall. Yes: I still recall the quality–or lack thereof–of everything going all the way back to the cold and snowy day of my November birth. If that be true–and it is–then fast forward with me and you will know that I speak the truth when I say that recalling something from the 1970s is a piece of graphite for me.
Morever, lean in and listen carefully: the damned yellow legal pad is not backlighted. Why am I whispering? For one good reason. I’m whispering because I don’t want anyone to steal my idea! If an ancient writing artifact like a yellow legal pad is going to continue to plague us, at the very least it should be backlighted so that it will not plague us in the dark.
Placeholder for When I Return to My Sanity and My Smartphone: Check the dictionary. Backlighted? Backlit?
I just heard someone ask, “Why does it matter if your yellow legal pad is not backlighted?” [See above Placeholder.]
Well, that’s a splendid question. it matters a lot. It’s starting to get dark outside. My overhead light makes a glare on the yellow legal pad, so I can’t use it. My nightstand lamp is not bright enough, so I can’t use it either. I must be blunt. I can no longer see what I am writing. And, like my pencil, let me be blunt again. If I can’t see what I’m writing, how do I look into the heart of what I’m thinking?
Thank you very much for your suggestion. I expected it. But, as much as I appreciate it–and I do–I will not run out tomorrow to buy a lamp to attach to my headboard. Simply explained: I won’t be needing it. I will never write another blog post on a yellow legal pad, using a #2 pencil, while lying in bed at night. Never. Never. Never.
However, I will figure out a way to finish this post since I accepted the challenge, sucker that I am.
Already I can think of three possible solutions.
Solution 1. Fill a Mason jar with fireflies. They might illuminate my yellow legal pad sufficiently.
Solution 2. Jerry-rig a flashlight to the headboard of my bed, with the light beaming down on the yellow legal pad propped up against my knobby knees.
Solution 3. Go to bed at 6pm so that I can work on my post for several hours before it gets too dark for me to see.
“Too dark for me to see” reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s first-person account of death, “I Heard a Fly Buzz.” The poem ends, I believe, with: “And then I could not see to see.”
Placeholder for When I Return to My Sanity and My Smartphone: Find the Dickinson poem and make sure that my quote above is accurate.
I am back to report that my tentative solutions–even though brilliant–were abysmal failures. That’s too kind. They were duds.
Firefly Solution. It was fairly easy to catch a jar full: they are everywhere in my yard. And, oh, my! Such a golden glow as they put out. For a while my bedroom looked almost like a nightclub dance floor with strobe lights. But it didn’t last long. The glow became dimmer and dimmer and dimmer. And, even more quickly, I grew a guilty feeling for having captured all those helpless little fireflies and for having put them to work against their will Contra Naturam. I set them free. Shine bright. Shine far.
Jerry-rigged Flashlight Solution. I thought for sure that this solution would work. However, I couldn’t figure out a way to mount the flashlight to my headboard, especially at the required angle. I considered duct tape which seems to work for everything, but when I recalled what I had paid for my Henkel Harris bed, I froze with tape and flashlight in mid-air. It took me hours to free myself.
Going to Bed at 6pm Solution. Forget it for one reason only. I have worked long and hard to earn the reputation that I now proudly hold as a wild, night-owl party animal. My friends and my colleagues have grown so proud of me as I have, over time, extended my bedtime from 8:00pm to 8:30pm to 9:00pm. And I have now, after years of practice, mastered the 10:00pm hour. When a party’s going down, I want to be found, and I certainly won’t be found if I am in bed at 6pm.
But I have come up with another solution that had not occurred to me initially. I will take the first hour of my morning routine to write my blog post on a yellow legal pad, using a #2 pencil.
Well, I tried it. Let me just say that this is not what anyone might hooey it up to be. Now I am wishing that I had challenged my two faithful followers to this challenge. Thankfully–and luckily for them–I am not that cruel. Absit iniuria.
They wouldn’t like all these disruptions either. Up until now, I have made perfectly good and methodical use of a sensible and calming way of writing my post in bed on my Smartphone. Even though I have willingly taken on a momentary stay against my ever-so sane method, I will remind myself–in mantra manner–that I am blazing new trails into Creative MetaNonfiction. History and literature demand that I continue. History and literature demand that I see this stupid stint through to a stupendous end.
Placeholder for When I Return to My Sanity and My Smartphone: Look up Creative MetaNonfiction to see whether such a genre exists. Oh, no. I remember that I have placed this placeholder in the post already, but since I cannot erase or scratch through, I will build upon the redundancy and puff it up as best I can. Have I actually stumbled upon–simply by stupidly accepting a challenge–a new genre? Oh, joy! Maybe I will enjoy a footnote in the annals of something–anything, please–after all.
Placeholder for When I Return to My Sanity and My Smartphone: Revisit Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” As I recall, the unnamed narrator who goes insane–always be suspicious of unnamed narrators–may have written HER journal on a yellow legal pad, using a #2 pencil. Well, I am fairly certain that she did not, but look it up anyway. Adding that twist to the original story would be masterful for an updated version. The narrator escaped from the yellow wallpaper. But I wonder: would she be able to escape from her yellow legal pad as masterfully as I am about to do, soon and very soon. You’re welcome.
What’s ironic about all of this is that when I accepted this challenge, I did so fully expecting fun, even if nothing more than hearing my pencil graphite its way across the page.
Placeholder for When I Return to My Sanity and My Smartphone: Can graphite be used as a verb? Well. Duh. I just used it as a verb in the preceding paragraph. Therefore, it can be. Therefore, I really do not need to follow through with this placeholder. I will keep it anyway in the interest of not ripping out this yellow page which is otherwise perfect.
But verbs notwithstanding, my pencil is not making those nostalgic sounds that I had longed for, not even when I bend my ear way down close and personal to the page. Instead, it glides along like a waxy crayon. And, in fact, my box of pencils is labeled, on one side of the box, Crayon. Oh, dear. I forgot. Crayon means pencil in some language. An esteemed English professor–a colleague–took great joy in beaming that to me when I showed the box to her. Well, never mind.
I do mind, however, that the only yellow pads that I could find anywhere were 8 1/2 by 11 inches, even though they were marked LegalPad. Well, excuse me. If it’s not 8 1/2 x 14 inches, it’s not legal, and shorties like the ones that I ended up with ought to be illegal.
Placeholder for When I Return to My Sanity and My Smartphone: (1) What companies still manufacture these so-called legal pads? (2) Do they come in true legal size? (3) Is it true, as I seem to recall, that courts no longer allow 8 1/2 x 14-inch legal pads because they do not fit readily into filing cabinets–not even virtual ones?
Placeholder for When I Return to My Sanity and My Smartphone: Do a comparable search into #2 pencils. Focus especially on what kind of graphite manufacturers are using for these crayons–I mean pencils–these days.
Placeholder for When I Return to My Sanity and My Smartphone: I need a pull quote for this post. What’s the one about a sucker is born every minute? How perfect would that be!
Okay. I need to wrap this post up–Maybe in a yellow graphite bow?–but before I do, I simply must achieve a sense of order with this post–the very first example ever of Creative MetaNonfiction. The annals of history await my final word. I do, too.
I know exactly what I will do. I’ll number the pages that I have written on this yellow legal pad, using a #2 pencil. And while I’m doing that, I’ll write AMDG just to the right of each page number, just as a Jesuit lawyer friend of mine did on all his labor relations notes, always written on a genuine yellow legal pad, using a genuine #2 graphite pencil.
Placeholder for When I Return to My Sanity and My Smartphone: Look up AMDG to see what that acronym means. Marty had a perverse sense of humor, but, surely, he would not have penciled anything obscene or scandalous, especially since he knew that I would see what he was writing because I almost always leaned over him at the bar. But be sure to look it up anyway before publishing this post.
Wow! I have written 11 pages already about nothing more than what it’s like to write my post on a yellow legal pad, using a #2 pencil, while lying in bed. Maybe this Creative MetaNonfiction thingy is not as bad as I have graphited it up to be. Well, if I can type it up, I can certainly graphite it up. But lo and behold! Here I’ve gone and coined still another word: graphited. Who knows? Maybe a Creative MetaNonfiction Novel looms in your future.
I suppose the only thing that might have been more fun than numbering the pages would have been ripping each one out and then taping them all together. I seem to recall a writer who typed one of his books on a continuous roll of paper, created by carefully taping each page together. This would have been, of course, back in the good old, hooey typewriter days.
Placeholder for When I Return to My Sanity and My Smartphone: Try to find out the writer who did this. I think that it was Jack Kerouac. I am certain. Yes. I recall it as vividly as if I had helped him! (Oh, how I wish.) He sellotaped enough pages to create a 120-foot roll when he wrote his On the Road. Check just to make sure. I would never dare publish anything without verifying all the facts before I spew forth. And also look up hooey. It looks like phooey to me.
As for any rhythm that I might be achieving while writing on a yellow legal pad, using a #2 pencil, forget it. Forget. It. Trust me. This post is not riding along on its own melting like a piece of ice on a hot stove. Frost itself wouldn’t work. And Frost himself wouldn’t be able to make it work either. I am so focused on paper and pencil that any semblance of thought has wisely flown far, far away to someone sensible enough to write a blog post sensibly on a Smartphone.
Worse, perhaps, I feel as if I am straddling an immeasurable and unfathomable chasm between the 1970s (when I enjoyed writing on a yellow legal pad, using a #2 pencil) and day before yesterday (when I lost my sanity and sold my writerly soul to the Devil by selling myself on the idea of accepting this challenge). To be certain, the image of such a straddler is an intriguing one. Conjure it up if you can. I double dare you. You will see for yourself. But let me assure you, post haste, that my legs–metaphorical or otherwise–are not nearly long enough to bridge such a chasm, and even if they were, I would not stand for it. I would object vehemently for all the world to hear, as, hopefully, all the world is hearing now.
Hear me and hear me well. What I am about to say is quotable, so go ahead and quote me: Phooey to all this hooey.
I object to it so much that I will end it all right now, in one final declaration!
This is a nonsensical challenge up with which I will not put.
FINALPlaceholder for When I Return to My Sanity and My Smartphone: As I recall, Winston Churchill came up with the above quip as an objection to an editor who wouldn’t allow sentences to end with prepositions. Churchill’s retort memorialized the folly of editors who foolishly adhere to grammatical rules rather than to common sense and to the sense of sound. Try to find the specifics. Was it in a memorandum? I’m sure that it was, perhaps in 1941?
Halleluiah! I have freed myself at last from this yellow legal pad and from #2 pencils. I have returned to my sanity. (Wisely, however, I will not change one thing–not one hooey-phooey word–that I have written so honestly and so painfully as I soared my way to and through the heights of this challenge. “The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on.” (No. I will not put a placeholder for that Shakespearean quote. You may kindly–if you please and if you need–google it yourself to obtain the specifics: play, act, and line.)And, thankfully, I have just returned to my Smartphone where I have just had joy beyond measure restored to every fiber–and even every fibre–of my being by doing nothing more than tap touching this post through to completion–one character at a time, using just one finger. Is that inefficient or what?
But the greatest joy ever is the knowledge that I have just written–and you have just read–the first example ever of Creative MetaNonfiction. May it not last forever in the annals of history and literature. May I be spared such notoriety. May I be remembered in far better ways. But, hey. What the heck. If you insist, I accept: better to be remembered for something, I suppose, than for nothing. Either way, it’s all hooey to me.
“A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.”
–Robert Frost (1874-1963)
You may take great pleasure in knowing that this may be my shortest blog post ever. The operative word here is may. I won’t know how short this post will be until I reach the end. That, I suppose, is my first writerly eccentricity. My writing–very much like Robert Frost’s–rides along on its own melting, like a piece of ice on a hot stove. It goes where it wants to go, and it moves where it wants to move.
But I suspect this post may be my shortest because I will be sharing my eccentricities. Goodness, no. Not those. How on earth did you know about those, anyway? They’re far too personal to share with the world at large. Besides, a post focusing on them would take years and years to share. Not really. But, on the other hand, maybe.
But since I have slid off course already, let me go ahead and share one–just one–of my personal eccentricities before attempting to get back into the flow of writing about my writing eccentricities.
Here it is. I have a tremendous fascination with numbers. Doesn’t that strike you as odd, especially since I am an English professor? It does me. Maybe it will strike you as less odd when I tell you that my fascination is limited to certain types of numbers. Like palindromes. You know. The ones that read the same, forward and backward. 11, 22, 101, 111, 666, 999. I don’t have anything against palindromes, mind you, especially if I only see one every now and then as I go about my day. But some days it seems they won’t go away, especially when they take up residence in my digital clocks and glare at me. 1:11. 3:13. 3:33. 7:07. (Thankfully, they never take up residence in my Grandfather Clock. Palindromes are as much visual as they are numerical.)
What’s even more fascinating are mirror hours. 10:10. 11:11. 12:12. You see them, right? Well, if you don’t, from this point forward, you will. And when you do, you will sit up and take notice, just as I do.
Depending on the combinations and the frequencies, I tend to believe–as many people do–that palindromic numbers and mirror hours signal the presence of messenger angels. I do my best to be attentive to their messages, too, especially if I see the same number repeatedly in the course of a day. A few days ago, for example, I couldn’t escape 555. It was everywhere. I even saw it on my Fitbit. After doing a timed, 6-minute morning meditation, my Fitbit showed that the session fell 5 seconds short, coming in at 5:55 minutes. But I didn’t mind. 555 is an intriguing Angel number heralding adventure, change, liberation, and intensity. Bring it all on. I’m revved. I’m ready.
But this is neither the time nor the place for me to discuss my personal eccentricities. I would be lying if I told you that I don’t have any more, just as you would be lying if you told me that you weren’t dying to know what they are. Forget it. I’m not telling. (Well, maybe a double Martini–extra dry, up, with a twist of lemon–could encourage me to tell a thing or three. Maybe.)
Let’s see. Let me do my best to slip-and-slide my way back a little closer to the melting ice cube of my original intent: my eccentricities as a writer. It occurs to me that this might be the perfect place to thank one of my faithful followers who, after reading my “Living with a Writer,” commented: “You are a published author that continues to educate and amuse us on a weekly basis. I’m sure we would all love to know what your quirks and eccentricities are when it comes to writing?”
I hope that you love what you have read so far so much that you will continue reading to the end as I continue to put into full public view my writerly quirks.
My second eccentricity as a writer bears close kinship to the first. Unlike Edgar Allan Poe who needed to know the last line of what he was writing before he put his pen to page, I need to know the first line of what I’m writing before I touch the first letter on my smartphone. (Yes. I write my blog posts on my smart phone. See my “Spaces and Habits of Famous–and Not-so-Famous–Writers.”) Once I get that first line, the rest melts along all on its own.
My third eccentricity as a writer relates to the first two. With the first line that I write, I like to get a rhythm going, usually a slow and easy one. It’s the sort of rhythm that gospel singer Rev. F. C. Barnes gets going in his “He Was There Just in Time to Rescue Me.” He opens his rendition by saying, “You know. This song is kinda like me: slow. But ya’ll don’t mind, do you?” Then he continues by working the title line and one or two other lines, over and over and over again, for a soothingly rhythmic song stretching out for 8:18 minutes. It’s much the same thing that the Barrett Sisters do in their “Jesus Loves Me” as they milk the rhythm and richness of just three words for a commanding 5:15 minutes. It’s the same thing that Lucille Clifton does in her “won’t you celebrate with me” as she rocks us in a world that has tried to kill her every day but has failed. Those rhythms–and other similar ones–bounce around and around and around in my head and sometimes carry more meaning than the actual words that I spit out. Frost would call it the sound of sense. In my own writing, I am never quite sure what the rhythm is or whether I am achieving it. Often it is more felt than seen, but it pulls my thoughts forward and piles them, like little pillows one atop another, and I like to think that it has the soft sound of sense.
My next eccentricity as a writer–my fourth–is one that I outgrew a long time ago, but it has such quirky quirks that I will memorialize it here for the record.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s when I was working on my The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, I drafted the general introduction and the introductions to each of the five sections in longhand.
But wait. It gets better.
I wrote them on a note pad. Not just any note pad. It had to be a yellow, legal notepad.
And it gets even better, if such be possible. I had to write using #2, yellow pencils. No erasers. Read on. Discover why.
If I made a mistake on a page, I could not erase. I could not scratch through and move on. I was compelled to rip out the blemished page and start over on a brand-new page, proving my mastery of ideas if not my mastery of time well spent.
I continued that approach to writing for a long, long time.
When PCs came along, however, I shifted with great joy because I discovered that I didn’t need to throw any of my drafts away. I could keep them all, simply by giving each a unique revision number. Keeping all of my drafts, I suppose, is my fifth eccentricity as a writer. I enjoy going back to see how an essay changed over time, from start to finish. More often than not, I will revise anything that I write a dozen or more times. (Let me add here that I love–absolutely love–preparing my posts in WordPress. It automatically tracks and keeps all the changes that I make for each and every post. Right now, for this post, WordPress has captured 22 revisions. I work hard for the money. Thank you very much.)
At this point, I have a huge decision to make. It involves an eccentricity that is personal, but it will have an impact on the writerly eccentricities that I do or do not share with you from this point forward. It, too, has to do with numbers. I do things in odd numbers only. For example, when I’m gardening, plants get planted as single plants or in groupings of 3, 5, 7, 9 and so on. I just don’t do even numbers. Right now, then, I have two choices, and choices are always good. I can stop my post here with five writing eccentricities. Or I can give you a sixth one and then be forced to end with a seventh.
Well, bless you, for shouting out that you want more. I am glad to continue, especially since 7 is one of my favorite numbers. Think about it for a minute. 7 Days. 7 Seas. 7 Brides. 7 Sisters. 7 Dwarfs. 7 Wonders of the Ancient World. And 7 Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Without further rhythmic delay, let’s start exploring my sixth eccentricity.
Those who know me, know that I do not like being told what to do (well, that’s generally true) especially when it comes to writing (and that’s always true). But I love telling others what to do, especially when it comes to writing. Here’s the backstory. It all started on a wordy, wordy day when I was a sophomore in high school. My teacher Anna Mae Collins would march into our classroom, always wearing prim and proper dresses that generally looked like a nurse’s uniform regardless of the color or the fabric. But that didn’t matter. Mrs. Collins loved the parts of speech and sentence diagramming, and since I loved both as well, I loved her all the more. For a typical writing assignment–given usually on a Friday–she would provide the topic and the word length for the essay. She had lots of topics–so many that I don’t remember any. But I remember that she loved essays that were 1,200 words long. More, she loved giving us a structural formula that we had to follow. Here’s how it might go. 9 paragraphs. 10 compound sentences. 6 compound-complex sentences. 4 complex sentences. 1 interrogative sentence. 1 exclamatory sentence. And 1 imperative sentence. We had to underline each of those various types of sentences and identify them in the margin.
We would work our proverbial little butts off all weekend. Well, that’s rather presumptuous of me, isn’t it? Let me revise that claim. I would work my proverbial little butt off all weekend. Ms. Collins would march into class on Monday. I’d be sitting right up front, all smiles because I had met all of her requirements, each and every one of them. I was pumped with pride. She would clomp up and down the aisles, collecting our essays one by one, sizing them up as she clomped.
With measured tread, she would advance to the front. “Class, I am fully confident that your essays are excellent. But you can make them better. Take them home tonight and cut out all the huff and puff and fluff. Watch out for those nasty prepositional phrases. Adjectives will work just as well. You must keep the content of your original essay. However, your revised essay can only be 700 words long. Exactly 700 words. Also, you must use the same formula that I gave you on Friday: 9 paragraphs. 10 compound sentences. 6 compound-complex sentences. 4 complex sentences. 1 interrogative sentence. 1 exclamatory sentence. And 1 imperative sentence.”
Folks. Folks. Folks. We’re talking the Dark Ages of the 1960s. We had to handwrite those essays on lined paper. We had to count the words, word by word. And here we were having to go home and do it all over again. The moans and groans were loud enough to be heard in the principal’s office which is precisely where Mrs. Collins would have marched us if we had challenged her assignment. The more often she gave us assignments like that, the more often I fell in love with Anna Mae because through her I fell in love with the power of revision, especially the powerful revision that takes place when writers have to follow precise guidelines, including word counts.
My sixth eccentricity as a writer, then, is my belief that less can be more. (I believe that everywhere, of course, except in my blog posts. For those, I fantasize that I am being paid by the word. For those, I fantasize that I have 1.41 million followers.)
It will come as no surprise, then, when I tell you that one of my favorite writing assignments for my students–in College Composition and in Creative Writing–is to have them write an essay that is exactly 500 words, excluding the title. Not 499. Not 501. Exactly 500. (Oh, my! I just had a wonderful idea. I can combine this quirk with my numbers quirk and change the length to exactly 555 words. It’s a done deal. Please do not tell prospective students who might have signed up for my classes this fall.)
Further, it will come as no surprise when I tell you that students never change. Mine moan and groan as much as my classmates did in 1963. Unlike them, however, my students come to class with their 500-word essays and thank me profusely. They truly do.
I’m not sure what just happened, but my sixth writerly eccentricity was remarkably longer than any of the previous ones.
I promise. My seventh will be shorter. Hopefully.
Anna Mae Collins was not my only English teacher who insisted on eliminating huff and puff and fluff through tight and rigorous revision.
In college, my freshman English professor Barbara Smith required us to analyze everything that we wrote using the Gunning Fog Index. It was developed by publisher Robert Gunning who theorized that people could not read because newspapers and periodicals encouraged writing that was far too complex. I was fascinated by the Fog Index and discovered readily that my 25-word sentences did nothing but hide the soul and spirit of my message. It was then that I started using smaller words and shorter sentences.
The Fog Index is still used, but today our computers can measure the fog level for us automatically. MS Word calls it Readability Statistics. Those metrics provide a word count, a Readability Score, a Grade Level, and more.
Here’s my seventh and final eccentricity as a writer: I run Readability Statistics on everything that I write. What’s that? You want proof? Sure. Here are the stats for this post: Readability Score: 76.4%. (The higher the percentage, the easier the read.) Grade Level: 6.1. (The lower the grade level, the easier the read.) I’m pleased with those stats. Maybe I’m slightly puffed. Maybe I’m slightly full of it. But I simply must tell you that former Presidents Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln’s best prose have comparable Readability Statistics. I cannot think of better company.
Clearly, this post did not end up as one of my shortest. It may end up as one of my longest.
What can I say? Blame it on the ice. Blame it on the hot stove. Blame it on Robert Frost. Better still: thank my faithful reader who asked me to write about my writerly quirks and eccentricities.
“All thought is a feat of association; having what’s in front of you bring up something in your mind that you almost didn’t know you knew.”
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Lots–and I mean lots–can be said about last week’s post “Living with a Writer.” I’m not talking about the number of views. The post enjoyed the usual readership. (I will note, however, that it had more readers than usual from foreign countries, including Bosnia & Herzegovina as well as Ecuador.) I’m not talking about Likes, although I was pleased that it had a few more Likes than usual. (It might interest you to know that “Fit as A Fiddle: The Inefficient Way” has the distinction of being my most Liked post of all.)
What’s really important about last week’s post relates to the mileage that I’ll be getting–this week and continuing for several weeks beyond–from reader feedback! I am listening. I hear you. I thank you. And trust me: I’m going to run with the ideas that you tossed my way. I always do.
Some feedback came as emails; other feedback came as comments published to the post.
Here’s my plan. This week I will focus exclusively on readers’ emails, since my responses to them are rather straightforward. I will reserve responses to last week’s comments until next week’s post. Actually, the comments are so rich that I might even get still another week’s post from their richness. Everything is copy. (See my “Directions to the Magical World of Ideas.”)
In one email, a faithful reader wanted to know what Lesley Francis–granddaughter of Robert and Elinor Frost–wrote in the copy of her The Frost Family’s Adventure in Poetry: Sheer Morning Gladness at the Brim that she gave me on April 9, 2002, when I introduced her as part of a Distinguished Lecture Series co-sponsored by Shenandoah University and Lord Fairfax Community College.
I was thrilled to get that email query because I had wanted to include the inscription in my initial post. Unfortunately, I could not because the book was in my office at the college, and, as you know, I work on these posts at night on my smartphone while lying in bed. If you don’t know that, you might want to read my “Spaces and Habits of Famous (and Not-So-Famous) Writers”.
Since last week’s post, though, I went to the college, I pulled the volume from my shelf, and I nostalgically read the inscription:
“For / Brent Kendrick, who / has let Frost lead him / ‘knowing how way leads on to / way.’ With best wishes from the author and granddaughter / Lesley Lee Francis / 4/9/02 / Lord Fairfax CC”.
The quote within her inscription, of course, is from the third stanza of what, without doubt, is one of Frost’s most popular poems, “The Road Not Taken”:
“And both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black. / Oh, I kept the first for another day! / Yet knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back.”
The same faithful reader wanted to know whether I had mentioned any specific Frost poems when I introduced his granddaughter. Splendid question. Indeed, I did. Throughout the afternoon on the day of Dr. Francis’ lecture–“Education by Poetry”–showers passed intermittently through our area, and I had been reciting in my mind a Frost poem that appeared in his book of poetry, A Boy’s Will. I recall wishing that the rain were a little heavier, that the winds were a little more fierce, and that the time of year were not quite so much into spring—perhaps a patch of snow here and there–so that the realities of the day would match more closely those of the poem that I had been reciting. Even though the poetic conditions and the natural conditions that day didn’t enjoy a one-to-one correlation, I included Frost’s “To the Thawing Wind” as part of my introduction. The poem welcomes spring rains, the return of birds and flowers, as well as flowing streams. But equally important is the desire for spring to “Burst into my narrow stall; / Swing the picture on the wall; Run the rattling pages o’er; Scatter poems on the floor; Turn the poet out of door.” Quoting the poem seemed perfect for the season and the occasion.
Another reader wanted to know some instances when something happened that made me think of a Robert Frost quote.
Actually, it happened most recently just a few minutes ago while I was writing. When I wrote “I nostalgically read the inscription,” I thought immediately of how Frost likened poetry to homesickness and love sickness:
“Poetry begins with a lump in your throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words” (Frost to Louis Untermeyer, 1916).
Here’s another instance. A few nights ago, when I had my nightly phone chat with my sister Audrey, she mentioned that she was rather taken aback when she went to swat a fly, and it seemed to pause and look at her. As she shared her experience with me, I was reminded of Frost’s “A Considerable Speck.” In the poem, the speaker encounters a speck on his manuscript page–still wet with ink. Just as he was about to “stop it with a period of ink,” he has a profound realization: “Plainly with an intelligence I dealt. / It seemed too tiny to have room for feet, / Yet must have had a set of them complete / To express how much it didn’t want to die. […] I have a mind myself and recognize / Mind when I meet with it in any guise. / No one can know how glad I am to find / On any sheet the least display of mind.”
And for one final example. Just this past Sunday, as I worshipped outdoors while weedwhacking along my mountain road to pretty it up for July 4th, I happened upon a small clump of storybook sweet peas with tenacious tendrils and a subtle, alluring fragrance. I had not planted it. How it had gotten there was a mystery to me. But it was so exquisite all alone–showcased midst briar and bramble and honeysuckle–that I spared it. I had not the heart to level it to the ground from which it sprang. I mowed around it, fully confident that it would bring joy to at least one passerby, perhaps more. And, if none, the seeing and the sparing had brought hefty morning notes of joy to me, equal to cathedral tunes.
As soon as the sweet pea stole my fancy–as soon as I saved it–my mind fragranced off to Frost’s “A Tuft of Flowers.” In the poem, the worker who has come to turn the grass after it has been mown, looks and listens unsuccessfully for the one who had done the mowing: “But he had gone his way, the grass all mown, / And I must be, as he had been,—alone, / ‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart, / ‘Whether they work together or apart.’” At that moment, a butterfly drew attention to a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook: “The mower in the dew had loved them thus, / By leaving them to flourish, not for us, / Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him. / But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.” As the poem continues, the speaker comes to the belief that he has stumbled upon a message from the dawn: “And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech / With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach. / ‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart, / ‘Whether they work together or apart.’”
Frostian moments such as these may be small. They may be fleeting. They may be seemingly insignificant. But one thing is for certain. They stand as extraordinary reminders of why literature matters: it has the magical power to transport us from our ordinary worlds to unforeseen spiritual realms.
Blessed are the weird people: poets, misfits, writers, mystics, painters, troubadours, for they teach us to see the world through different eyes.
Jacob Nordby –author of Blessed Are the Weird: A Manifesto for Creatives (2016)
Writers have been the mainstay of my intellectual life since childhood.
It’s safe to say that I know more about writers than I know about anything else. I know not only the breadth and depth of their literary canons (especially those writers whose works I enjoy and teach) but also the breadth and depth of their lives (even those writers whose works I do not enjoy and do not teach).
Taken as a whole, I suppose that writers are a hard lot to live with. (Taken as a whole, I suppose that we are all a hard lot to live with.)
But writers seem to be harder to live with than most of us, and they have more quirks and more eccentricities in their lives and relationships than most of us. Or, maybe it’s simply that they are more in our faces because they have achieved literary fame, the consequence of which is having the world look at all the foibles of their lives through painstaking, unforgiving, and unforgetting research.
A few examples of writerly quirks and eccentricities will suffice. Then you can decide for yourself.
One of the first writers to pop into my mind is Oscar Wilde. He had many eccentricities, but can you imagine living with someone who once walked down the street with his pet lobster on a leash, as he supposedly did on at least one occasion?
Or what about Lord Byron who, when at school, kept a pet bear in his room, walked it around campus on a leash, and even tried to get it a fellowship.
More alarming, still, is Mary Shelley who wrote with her 23-foot boa wrapped around her shoulders. Supposedly, she would write until the boa started to squeeze, at which moment she would stop for the day. Perfect timing, no?
Shelley and Byron and Wilde make Edgar Allan Poe look rather sane if not downright boring. So what if he wrote with his Siamese cat on his shoulder as a double source of relaxation and inspiration? No big deal.
At least two writers had a thing for apples and water, separately not together–the apples and the water, not the authors. Friedrich Schiller kept rotten apples in his desk drawer, claiming that the smell motivated him. And to keep from falling asleep while writing, he dipped his feet into ice water. For her inspiration–a century or so later–Agathie Christie chose to eat the apples rather than let them rot. She did so while taking a bath.
At least one writer wrote wearing nothing but his ideas and his underwear (John Cheever). Another exercised naked in front of the window (Franz Kafka) and enjoyed going to nudist camps. He always stood out in the crowd. Go ahead. Guess. Nope. You’re wrong. He was the only guy wearing swimming trunks.
Some writers stand out in other ways: their writing quarters. Dylan Thomas had a writing hut on his estate. Roald Dahl visited Thomas and was so impressed by the hut that he made one for himself based on the exact same dimensions. George Bernard Shaw’s writing hut was truly unique. It was built on a turntable so that it could be rotated to let in the sun.
And let’s not leave out some really strange quirks that writers use to achieve quotas or to meet deadlines. I am most impressed by Demosthenes who shaved half of his head, knowing that his embarrassment would keep him at home and on task. Victor Hugo was far less dramatic: he met his writing quotas simply by having his valet hide his clothes.
Unrelated to the preceding examples of writers having hard-to-live-with quirks are two writerly snippets too good to not snip and include here. I must. I can. Therefore, I shall. Did you know that John Steinbeck’s dog Toby ate nearly half of the first manuscript version of his Of Mice and Men? I cannot help but wonder whether that culinary delight is the origin of the student lament that educators hear over and over again, “My dog ate my homework.”
All right. I cannot leave you or me in such intellectual limbo. I will be right back to report my findings after I consult the Oxford English Dictionary(OED).
I’m back. What a fun journey, though I confess that my speculation was in error. The phrase first appeared in print in the Manchester Guardian (July 1929): “It is a long time since I have had the excuse about the dog tearing up the arithmetic homework.”
While consulting the OED, I decided to go ahead and verify the second snippet that I am about to snip and share since I was not certain of its accuracy. Did you know that Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the following: selfless, psychosomatic, bipolar, bisexual, and suspension of disbelief?
All right. I was wrong about selfless. It first appeared in J. Godolphin Holy Arbor (1651): “I leave this Memento with all selfless Christians.” Coleridge did not use it until 1825 in his Aids to Reflections 112: “Holy Instincts of Maternal Love, detached and in selfless purity.”
I was right about the other words. Psychomatic first appeared in Coleridge’s Shorter Wks. & Fragments (1834): “Hope and Fear..have slipt out their collars, and no longer run in couples…from the Kennel of my Psycho–somatic Ology.” Bipolar appeared in 1810 in his Friend: “Philosophy being necessarily bipolar.” Bisexual appeared in 1825 in his Aids to Reflection. 252: “The very old Tradition of the Homo androgynus, i.e. that the original Man..was bi-sexual.” And my favorite of all–suspension of disbelief–first appeared in his Biographia Literaria II. xiv. 2: “A semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (1817).
Obviously, I am fascinated by writers’ quirks and eccentricities. What is not so obvious is the fact that I would have been able to tolerate and be amused by the quirks and eccentricities if I had actually lived with a writer.
For better or for worse, I never had the opportunity.
But I have been blessed to live with one writer for most of my entire life, 24/7. Vicariously.
That’s exactly what I have done with Robert Frost since 1955 when he took up his residence with me, vicariously: heart, head, home.
It’s been easy living with him as I have done. In fact, I would say that I have had the best of all possible Frostian worlds. I have enjoyed all the good. And I have been spared all the drama–mainly a thread of depression that seems to have plagued the entire family. I have been able to read about it rather than live with it.
I started living with Frost when I was in the third grade. My teacher, Marie Massie, introduced me to literature, and she started with Robert Frost. She hooked me with his poem “Birches.” I still recall reciting the entire lengthy poem–59 lines–not only before the entire class but also mid-air, alone, as I too “subdued my father’s trees / By riding them down over and over again / Until I took the stiffness out of them.” It did not matter to me then that I had not caught the deeper meanings of the poem and that I had missed the ambiguities. I simply liked the sounds, the word play, the associations. And I wanted more. My teacher obliged, not just with poems, but also with Frost’s “The Figure a Poem Makes.” I dare say that very little of the essay made sense to my third-grade mind, but I warmed up from the start to Frost’s notion that poetry, like a piece of ice on a hot stove, should ride along on its own melting.
From that point forward, Frost has served as my own literary touchstone, constant companion, and friend. Every day, at least once a day, sometimes more, something always seems to happen that reminds me of something in Frost’s poetry. And off I go on my poetic flight. Or perhaps it is that every day, at least once a day, something in Frost’s poetry reminds me of something else. And off I fly. Whichever way it happens, it’s a journey of constant joys and surprises and poetic feats of associations.
On more than one occasion, Frost has been my dream companion.
It’s usually the same dream, over and over, capturing the stereotypical–and erroneous–image of Frost, the farmer poet. Frost and I are always in a garden. It’s always summer. I’ve always worked up a heavy sweat, always pushing a hand plow, always tilling the soil between rows of plants while he always sits all relaxed and all leisure-like on a stump as he recites some of his poems.
That recurring dream started when I was in grade school. I still dream the dream from time to time, and I love it because I am always young and thrilled to be laboring in the presence of my very own poet.
I try, as best I can, to forget the one spat that I had with Frost. Thank God, it was a vicarious and momentary falling out, a literary lovers’ quarrel of sorts. I remember the details vividly. They still pain my memory.
It was the morning of January 20, 1961. Robert Frost had been asked to write and read a poem at John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration. For the occasion, Frost wrote “Dedication.” I watched as televised Frost entered the homes of Americans and others throughout the world. It was an historic occasion. Kennedy was the youngest president to be elected at the age of 43. Kennedy was the first Catholic to be elected president. And Frost was the first poet to be invited to read at a presidential inauguration.
It was a cold, blustery, snowy day and the sun was shining so glaringly on Frost’s manuscript that he fumbled and fumbled and fumbled. Yet he kept trying. Finally, he decided–wisely–to abandon the manuscript of the poem written for the occasion and instead to recite from memory his “The Gift Outright.” Both poems are so similar in spirit that I am not certain the shift in text mattered.
Frost was clearly embarrassed by the turn of events and his struggle, but the audience roared with approval and Frost stole their hearts.
He made my heart fall. I remember commenting to my parents, who were watching television with me, that the crowd cheered simply because they were glad that the fiasco was over and that laws should exist to keep old people from embarrassing themselves in public that way.
To this day, I cannot believe my youthful unkindness on the occasion. I have shared my reaction down through the years, hoping that open confession would lessen the pain of my thoughtlessness.
It has not.
On a more positive note, on more than one occasion, I’ve nearly brushed up against fleeting moments of Frostian fame.
As an undergraduate, I decided to prepare a concordance of Frost’s poetry. Without consulting anyone, I spent two years building the concordance on index cards. At that point, I was emboldened to propose the publication to Frost’s publisher, Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston. Their reply brought a crushing blow: they had entered into a contract with Edward Connery Lathem to develop a Frost concordance. It was published several years later in 1971.
Another close brush with Frostian fame came a year or two later when I reached out to the United States Postal Service suggesting a Commemorative Postage Stamp on the one hundredth anniversary of Frost’s birth: March 26, 1974. Unfortunately, work on the commemorative stamp was underway already. Nonetheless, my enthusiasm earned me a Frost Commemorative Postage Stamp Poster, and it has graced every office that I have occupied since then. I always hang it so that it’s the first thing anyone sees when they enter my office. Measuring three feet by four feet, it is commanding, and it makes a commanding statement. To the right of the crusty old bard’s portrait–seated and writing at a makeshift desk–is a quote from his poem “Mending Wall”: “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offense. / Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…”
I value the poster not only because of my personal–albeit ever so slight–connection to the commemorative postage stamp but also because the quote captures a critically important lesson in human relationships and gives each of us an ongoing admonishment about the folly of building walls that separate us from ourselves and those around us.
Decades later, I brushed against Frost in the flesh, if you will, when I had the honor of introducing his granddaughter, Leslie Lee Francis, as part of a 2002 Distinguished Lecture Series co-sponsored by Shenandoah University and Lord Fairfax Community College. She spoke on “Education by Poetry.” It was a special treat for me to meet and chat extensively with Dr. Francis, daughter of Lesley Frost, the eldest child of Robert and Elinor Frost. When the evening ended, she gifted me with an inscribed copy of her book The Frost Family’s Adventure in Poetry: Sheer Morning Gladness at the Brim (University of Missouri Press, 1994.) In the book, Dr. Francis traces the family’s adventures from their years on the Derry Farm in New Hampshire through their nearly three years in England, bringing Robert Frost to the brink of recognition as a poet. Her gift brought me to the brink of tears.
Who would have ever dreamt that a third-grade teacher in the mountainous coal fields of West Virginia would have turned me on to a poet with such fervor that he would become my constant companion for life? But she did. I have never forgotten the magic that she worked, and it’s that same kind of magic that I hope to perform whenever I enter a classroom to teach a literature course. I always have in mind certain goals, objectives, and outcomes that I hope my students will achieve. But deep down in my heart I have one goal that surpasses all of the pedagogical ones. And I share it with my students. My hope for them is that somewhere during the course they will find a writer—a poet, short story writer, playwright, novelist—any writer who from that point forward will serve as a touchstone in their lives—a friend; a companion; someone who will be there with them always; someone they can live with forever.
Living with a writer, especially vicariously, might just be the best of all possible worlds.
The Wired Researcher 