Filling the Spaces

I was eighteen and it was my first ever A+.

My professor, a Cambridge English Literature graduate we were fortunate to have and who still favored the tweed jackets and thick walking boots of her London hunting and hounds days, distributed our final term papers with her usual brisk efficiency.  When she got to my desk, she looked down and paused and just as I realized I was holding my breath, she laid the neatly bound, plastic covered pages down with a quick and ruthless gesture.

“Fine work.” she said and moved on.  I didn’t dare to think I might’ve seen the trace of a smile until I looked down and saw a bright red A+ in the upper right hand corner,  boldly printed and underlined so hard that the page had curled up.  “Displays an excellent way with language” she’d added in the side margin, “Enviable clarity of thought and a fiery imagination.  Do keep it up.”

  

I stared at that A+ every day that summer, always a little afraid that the small but thick blaze of color might catch fire or disappear with a touch.  It was the very first validation of a dream that I might one day become the writer I longed to be though of course, at eighteen, validation is fleeting and it certainly wouldn’t pay the following year’s tuition.  I loved writing, loved language and books, the idea of stringing words together like popcorn and having it all make sense was seductive and satisfying.  I was a shy and withdrawn student, a loner who used writing to express the things I couldn’t bring myself to say openly or freely.  I suspected it might prove a good way to detoxify and vent and tell a story all at the same time and the approval of a British born intellectual meant that I might not be entirely mistaken.

College ended, however, and wanting and doing turned out to be quite different animals.  I continued to write and fill journals which eventually filled cardboard cartons that I kept hidden in my closet.  I wrote love stories and sleazy romances, tried my hand at poetry which was tragically bad even though the words came effortlessly enough, drafted outlines for mystery stories and sea tales, wrote portraits of my family and coming of age essays.   I took creative writing courses, searching, I suppose, for another A+ and another validation.  But the few submission attempts I made proved futile and while it didn’t seem fair to be denied something I wanted so desperately,  rejection is undermining and painful.  Eventually, one perfect autumn day, I transferred all the cartons now faded and filled with yellowing pages that no one would ever read, to the leaf pile.  It was time to reconcile and move on and even my beloved A+ paper went up in the October wood smoke.

Decades passed.  Pen and paper became typewriters, typewriters became computer keyboards and all I wrote were letters home until my cousin introduced me to blogging.  What began as a simple on line journal of random thoughts and memories was suddenly a collection of mostly true stories, mostly from childhood and mostly written for my own benefit.  I began to get positive feedback from friends who passed on the stories to other friends and soon, with the continuing support and encouragement from my cousin, I began to write regularly, not the glossy, tabloid crap I had once imagined would bring me fame and fortune, just simple stories about growing up with alcoholism, about finding your way, about the life and the people of a small fishing village in Nova Scotia, about my grandmother.

  

I write for myself, saying the things I need to say, not what I think others might want to hear.  I decorate stories when I feel I need to, when my memory of dialogue fails, I fill in the empty spaces with what I know someone would’ve said or what they did say another time.