Parts of my story are pretty common. Sensitive, artsy queer kid raised in a hostile world.
I figured out I wanted to be a writer in fifth grade, when my school hosted an author who talked about her books. I couldn't tell you who she was, but I tried to send her a letter with book ideas of my own. This was the seventies, and divorce was still pretty uncommon. A classmate of mine had announced her parents were divorcing. There were actual gasps. So my writing career at that point was going to start with Mommy and Daddy Don't Love Each Other Anymore. I handed the letter to my teacher, who promptly threw it in the garbage.
So that sucked. I never did finish that novel! My next go was in high school, writing a play for a drama competition. My mother typed it for me. A comedy, a riff on the sitcom format. Again about divorce. A therapist is trying to rid himself of a neurotic wife. His secretary asks him, "How did you two meet, anyway?" The therapist says, "She was a case example at a seminar on narcissism." Haw! One judged liked the one-liners. One judge hated them. End of competition.
Again and again, I was discouraged, and like a lot of kids, I bought it. Then I learned to spare people the effort and talked myself out of writing over and over again. And to be fair, there's always a rational case for doing something other than what we do. You want to spend a million hours working on something people may or may not buy? Great, but what about your student loans, your mortgage, your health insurance, your retirement?
Et cetera, et cetera, et ...
There I was, mid forties, a high-functioning alcoholic, dealing with the things one deals with. Disappointment. Unresolved trauma. My family had a lot going on. A lot. Secret marriages, love children, sexual abuse, enough divorces that you begin to lose track. But it was all hidden, for decades in some cases. That left me with an eye for secrets if nothing else. A eye for what disappears, which I started to develop later in life, like in my story "Gone Home."
Poetry, which I wouldn't have predicted in a million years, started flowing out of me. Poems about pain and beauty, collisions between the vast and the miniscule, poems of transformation and oblivion, rewriting the hidden parts of our stories.
So here I am, late fifties, a high-functioning sober person, now in the oldest living generation of all those secrets and lies. What becomes of the hidden, the stolen away, once it's revealed? Let's find out.
