The first conscious memory I have of writing for pleasure and not necessity was in the second grade. It was spring, and Mrs. Vitro, my young and inexperienced twentysomething year-old teacher was attempting to bring a little creativity to our otherwise mundane Catholic school curriculum. It was spring, and that meant that all the teachers in Our Lady Star of the Sea would decorate the bulletin boards and windows with something spring-themed: impossibly colored flowers and smiling suns, Easter eggs and bunny rabbits. Jesus had died for our sins, been resurrected, and summer vacation was right around the corner.
“Okay, class,”’ she said, passing around Xeroxed sheets in the shape of a butterfly with five lines inside its wings, one for the title, four for the poem we were tasked to write, “we are going to write a poem about spring.” She then wrote, in her best teacher penmanship, a sample:
Spring
Spring is here.
Let’s all cheer.
Spring is great.
Let’s celebrate!
“Now, boys and girls, I want you to cut out your butterfly as neatly as possible.” She continued. “Write a poem about spring and then decorate it with bright colors.” The class of uniformed students uniformly copied Mrs. Vitro’s poem, maybe transposing a line or two, the daring ones or those who simply couldn’t follow directions varying the order. Then they cut the butterflies out with safety scissors and used their Crayolas to mimic butterfly designs. I did something different.
I wrote a poem about a bumble bee that loved a butterfly but shied away from expressing his true feelings because he thought she would be afraid of his stinger. I didn’t think anything of it. It was a poem about a butterfly, written in my neatest penmanship. Really, I wanted to get to the coloring, what I felt was the more fun part of the assignment. But when I brought my poem up for the teacher’s inspection, a necessary part of the assignment, she looked at me with surprise.
“Did you write this?” she asked. I thought I had done something wrong and reluctantly nodded that I had.
“Rebecca!” she said, smiling. “You can write!”
It was then, at age seven, that I realized I possessed a spark that everyone else didn’t have. I could write.
Over the rest of my elementary and high school years, I filled countless marble and spiral notebooks. I wrote plays and cast my friends in the roles. I wrote poems and stories and novellas. My mother told me that every single teacher praised my writing ability and assured her that one day I was going to be a writer. I wrote for my high school newspaper and literary arts magazine, eventually becoming editor of both. I made a ton of extra money writing other students’ college admissions essays. It was easy, and I could never understand why people struggled with it. Just write. It seemed simple enough.
Despite these accolades from my instructors and peers, the biggest validation of my writing ability came during my junior year of high school. Creative Writing was an elective for juniors and seniors only, a special course reserved for a select few. The teacher was Joe Morale, a chubby guy with thick glasses, bordering on nerdish. He wore jeans every single day. He was funny and inspiring, but he was also extremely critical. It was the first time in my life I ever got less than an A on a writing assignment. He was stingy with his praise, assuring us that he wasn’t doing us any favors by telling us we were perfect and couldn’t get any better. We improved, he told us, by learning what wasn’t working in our stories so we could make it better.
I adored him.
He introduced me to Rocky Horror and the Who’s Tommy. He wrote long comments on our assignments, asking pointed questions about character motivation, symbolism, and realistic dialogue. He was a passionate writer himself, authoring several plays that were produced by small-time local theater companies and performed in the Jewish Community Center. I always saw him as a writer first, teaching school to pay the bills. Most students were shocked – and even insulted -- by his brutal honesty. Whenever a student told him he or she wanted to be a writer, he was famous for responding, “Don’t quit your day job.” He slapped you in the face with reality: not everyone was talented, not everyone could be a writer.
I was petrified to turn in my final paper, a first-person narrative about where we saw writing fitting into our futures. Dare I tell him that I hoped to write someday? Dare I risk being told that I wasn’t nearly as talented as I thought? Perhaps I could instead tell him I aspired to be something more practical, a journalist who dabbled in creative writing for fun. I even wrote that if I ever did get a book published, I would dedicate it to Mrs. Vitro, the first teacher who made me feel proud of my writing.
When I got my paper back, it was uncharacteristically unmarked, without critique, except for a simple sentence at the end of the essay. It said, “Dedicate your second book to me.”
It was more validation than I could have ever hoped for, especially from Joe Morale.
In my yearbook, under his smiling picture, he wrote, “Remember that life is precious.” I thought he was referencing the chronic depression I battled and wrote about. It was during his class that I started wearing black and rimming my eyes with thick eyeliner. I listened to the Sex Pistols and The Cure and The Ramones. I wrote long, wordy opinion pieces in the school newspaper about how pointless I felt it was to live in Bayonne, New Jersey, how people who stayed in New Jersey were bound to be sucked into the cesspool of despair that clung to every mile of the Garden State Parkway. I broke the school dress code and refused to take off my sunglasses in class. I bragged when I made a new teacher cry. Saying life was precious was akin to saying, “Good morning, Star Shine, the earth says hello.” I thought he was being his sarcastic self, thumbing his nose at my lugubrious ways.
Mr. Morale died of AIDS-related complications four years after I graduated. He was 41 years old.
Coincidentally, it was during this time I stopped writing. I was an English major at USM, shedding my journalist aspirations years earlier when I realized that I didn’t like reporting and writing about facts. I didn’t know what I was going to do with a BA in English. I just knew that I liked to read, and writing academic papers about literature seemed like an easy way to earn a degree. I didn’t have time to write creatively, not when there were failed relationships to focus on and alcohol I could legally drink. I certainly didn’t have time to write after I found out I was pregnant, a result of a rebound relationship. Suddenly, with a baby in my near future, I had to focus on graduating and getting a job.
I took a creative writing class in college because it fit into my schedule and fulfilled a requirement for my major. I hadn’t written anything non-academic in years, and rekindling my lost creativity felt like the first time I ate an oyster, scary and unfamiliar. I stared at my computer screen, the cursor blinking back at me, without a single thing to say. Long gone were the days when I could make up stories, spit out pages of dialogue without hesitation, adjectives pouring from me. The class was filled with aspiring poets and prosers… I wanted to tell them all not to quit their day jobs. If I had one, I wouldn’t have quit mine.
My daughter was born, and single motherhood and full-time classes didn’t leave time for writing. What could I write about, anyway? My life was filled with diapers and breastfeeding, term papers and studying for the GRE. I was going to be practical and get a graduate degree in higher education administration. I was going to grow up, become marketable. I wanted something safe, something with benefits and paid vacation leave. Writing wasn’t going to give me any of those things, so I didn’t give it any consideration. I went forward with my life, sans writing.
I thought I was happy.
I earned an MS Ed in college administration and landed a job in upstate New York, at one of the state universities. I liked working with the students and adored my staff. For fun, one weekend, my assistant Nychey asked me if I wanted to go with her to see a psychic. It seemed harmless enough. I was 30 and hoping to move to the west coast where I could get an administrative position that allowed me to teach a few college classes. I thought I was happy even though I was single and lonely. Maybe this psychic could give me some direction. The first thing she said to me was, “There’s a man… who has passed… with dark hair and glasses…And he wants to know why … you stopped writing?”
“Okay, class,”’ she said, passing around Xeroxed sheets in the shape of a butterfly with five lines inside its wings, one for the title, four for the poem we were tasked to write, “we are going to write a poem about spring.” She then wrote, in her best teacher penmanship, a sample:
Spring
Spring is here.
Let’s all cheer.
Spring is great.
Let’s celebrate!
“Now, boys and girls, I want you to cut out your butterfly as neatly as possible.” She continued. “Write a poem about spring and then decorate it with bright colors.” The class of uniformed students uniformly copied Mrs. Vitro’s poem, maybe transposing a line or two, the daring ones or those who simply couldn’t follow directions varying the order. Then they cut the butterflies out with safety scissors and used their Crayolas to mimic butterfly designs. I did something different.
I wrote a poem about a bumble bee that loved a butterfly but shied away from expressing his true feelings because he thought she would be afraid of his stinger. I didn’t think anything of it. It was a poem about a butterfly, written in my neatest penmanship. Really, I wanted to get to the coloring, what I felt was the more fun part of the assignment. But when I brought my poem up for the teacher’s inspection, a necessary part of the assignment, she looked at me with surprise.
“Did you write this?” she asked. I thought I had done something wrong and reluctantly nodded that I had.
“Rebecca!” she said, smiling. “You can write!”
It was then, at age seven, that I realized I possessed a spark that everyone else didn’t have. I could write.
Over the rest of my elementary and high school years, I filled countless marble and spiral notebooks. I wrote plays and cast my friends in the roles. I wrote poems and stories and novellas. My mother told me that every single teacher praised my writing ability and assured her that one day I was going to be a writer. I wrote for my high school newspaper and literary arts magazine, eventually becoming editor of both. I made a ton of extra money writing other students’ college admissions essays. It was easy, and I could never understand why people struggled with it. Just write. It seemed simple enough.
Despite these accolades from my instructors and peers, the biggest validation of my writing ability came during my junior year of high school. Creative Writing was an elective for juniors and seniors only, a special course reserved for a select few. The teacher was Joe Morale, a chubby guy with thick glasses, bordering on nerdish. He wore jeans every single day. He was funny and inspiring, but he was also extremely critical. It was the first time in my life I ever got less than an A on a writing assignment. He was stingy with his praise, assuring us that he wasn’t doing us any favors by telling us we were perfect and couldn’t get any better. We improved, he told us, by learning what wasn’t working in our stories so we could make it better.
I adored him.
He introduced me to Rocky Horror and the Who’s Tommy. He wrote long comments on our assignments, asking pointed questions about character motivation, symbolism, and realistic dialogue. He was a passionate writer himself, authoring several plays that were produced by small-time local theater companies and performed in the Jewish Community Center. I always saw him as a writer first, teaching school to pay the bills. Most students were shocked – and even insulted -- by his brutal honesty. Whenever a student told him he or she wanted to be a writer, he was famous for responding, “Don’t quit your day job.” He slapped you in the face with reality: not everyone was talented, not everyone could be a writer.
I was petrified to turn in my final paper, a first-person narrative about where we saw writing fitting into our futures. Dare I tell him that I hoped to write someday? Dare I risk being told that I wasn’t nearly as talented as I thought? Perhaps I could instead tell him I aspired to be something more practical, a journalist who dabbled in creative writing for fun. I even wrote that if I ever did get a book published, I would dedicate it to Mrs. Vitro, the first teacher who made me feel proud of my writing.
When I got my paper back, it was uncharacteristically unmarked, without critique, except for a simple sentence at the end of the essay. It said, “Dedicate your second book to me.”
It was more validation than I could have ever hoped for, especially from Joe Morale.
In my yearbook, under his smiling picture, he wrote, “Remember that life is precious.” I thought he was referencing the chronic depression I battled and wrote about. It was during his class that I started wearing black and rimming my eyes with thick eyeliner. I listened to the Sex Pistols and The Cure and The Ramones. I wrote long, wordy opinion pieces in the school newspaper about how pointless I felt it was to live in Bayonne, New Jersey, how people who stayed in New Jersey were bound to be sucked into the cesspool of despair that clung to every mile of the Garden State Parkway. I broke the school dress code and refused to take off my sunglasses in class. I bragged when I made a new teacher cry. Saying life was precious was akin to saying, “Good morning, Star Shine, the earth says hello.” I thought he was being his sarcastic self, thumbing his nose at my lugubrious ways.
Mr. Morale died of AIDS-related complications four years after I graduated. He was 41 years old.
Coincidentally, it was during this time I stopped writing. I was an English major at USM, shedding my journalist aspirations years earlier when I realized that I didn’t like reporting and writing about facts. I didn’t know what I was going to do with a BA in English. I just knew that I liked to read, and writing academic papers about literature seemed like an easy way to earn a degree. I didn’t have time to write creatively, not when there were failed relationships to focus on and alcohol I could legally drink. I certainly didn’t have time to write after I found out I was pregnant, a result of a rebound relationship. Suddenly, with a baby in my near future, I had to focus on graduating and getting a job.
I took a creative writing class in college because it fit into my schedule and fulfilled a requirement for my major. I hadn’t written anything non-academic in years, and rekindling my lost creativity felt like the first time I ate an oyster, scary and unfamiliar. I stared at my computer screen, the cursor blinking back at me, without a single thing to say. Long gone were the days when I could make up stories, spit out pages of dialogue without hesitation, adjectives pouring from me. The class was filled with aspiring poets and prosers… I wanted to tell them all not to quit their day jobs. If I had one, I wouldn’t have quit mine.
My daughter was born, and single motherhood and full-time classes didn’t leave time for writing. What could I write about, anyway? My life was filled with diapers and breastfeeding, term papers and studying for the GRE. I was going to be practical and get a graduate degree in higher education administration. I was going to grow up, become marketable. I wanted something safe, something with benefits and paid vacation leave. Writing wasn’t going to give me any of those things, so I didn’t give it any consideration. I went forward with my life, sans writing.
I thought I was happy.
I earned an MS Ed in college administration and landed a job in upstate New York, at one of the state universities. I liked working with the students and adored my staff. For fun, one weekend, my assistant Nychey asked me if I wanted to go with her to see a psychic. It seemed harmless enough. I was 30 and hoping to move to the west coast where I could get an administrative position that allowed me to teach a few college classes. I thought I was happy even though I was single and lonely. Maybe this psychic could give me some direction. The first thing she said to me was, “There’s a man… who has passed… with dark hair and glasses…And he wants to know why … you stopped writing?”
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