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Model #4

Nunc Stet?

Go Backwards. Theory: truth morphs the further it slides from the present. So I will start my writer's autobiography now, from this moment, from this Pilot V-ball grip pen. Monday afternoon and hungry. And I will walk backwards.

Here I am. Writing.

So I pose the question: am I a writer? If it's definition, "one who writes," is all, then yes I am. If it means I wear a beret and spit at the bourgeoisie, then no. But hey, I get A's. I consume ink and devour trees. I am afraid.

I am afraid that one day the devil's advocates will pull the sheet off my head. They will grin their needle teeth--they will clap and dance in glee. One will shriek "peek-a-boo, peek-a-boo, peek-a-boo."

I am discovered.

I am revealed as the academic student-writer that I am. All over the evening news. Walter Cronkite dismisses me as a writing fraud with nothing new to say and no new way to say it.

Perhaps all I can do is regurgitate and dangle adjectives.

I am sorry for you that this autobiography is decisively inconclusive. I am still living, still grappling, and still afraid.

When I reflect on my writing, I see nothing really impressively different or thrilling to mention up until this recent present.

Honestly. In elementary school, writing was a vital tool to be mastered, not so different from potty training. If a child could not spell "melon" or happened to wet themselves, peer mocked them ruthlessly. The cheese always stood alone. Writing equated survival.

In middle and high school I remember taking this attitude toward writing: I could say and do the forbidden. Through writing, I tested and manipulated my peers. How did they respond if I wrote about the gory murder of a prositute in a hospital elevator. What if I penned a personal poem in a cryptic language? Would they worry if I wrote about drug use? Writing was a way of establishing me in the context of others.

Somewhere in there I recognized enough compliments to believe that I was a decent writer. Naturally, I interpreted this as, "Aby, you're a damn fine writer." So I got cocky.

For years I was smug. I don't think I showed it, not in a haughty manner anyway. Just confident and satisfied. Had I known how challenging and consuming quality writing had to be, I probably would not have chosen writing as my college major.

Lucky for me, though, the dear professors at Eastern Oregon University were benelovent enough to devastate my confidence, chide my formerly called "depth," and hunt me down like legendary furies until I cried out, "My God My God..." Whoa, I think I am getting sacreligious. Forgive me kind reader.

I did cry out. I cried on the flannel shirts of those who had seen me publicly humiliated. The worst was when I was deemed "creepy" for showing my struggles in a poem.

One term I defied writing beyond what I knew. The epicenter of every poem and every story had to be my kitchen, garden, window seat. I intended to heal my wounded soul through the delicate scalpel of a pencil. So in my poetry class, I entered proverbially naked. My words were real and honest--a good thing, no? It was moving and experimental. He ripped it apart. He said I was creepy. He said I came across like a naked exhibitionist who only wanted to be admired. Then he said, "Hey, don't you live at the corner of Penn and Sixth?" Great. Now everyone knew where the creepy girl lurked. Whereas from the breakfast table I had eagerly, maniacally almost, waved through the window to those I knew, I kept the shades down for nearly a month.

Admittedly, my best moment also came from this poetry class. There was very little shine and pomp this time. It's just that I had thrown all of the energy of a momentous week into a poem. I didn't translate straight across. The poem's topic was unrelated to the week's topic; the glory was that I harnessed energy and transformed it. The poem, Broke, or what happened to me when i heard about the destsruction of Hiroshima, is the only piece I have ever written that I feel is truly worth revision in the grand scheme. I believe it is my doorway piece. When I read it to the professor, he gave a silend nod and said, "Successful," and that was all.

So here we are, closer to truth perhaps, closer to the honesty that there is a vast canyon separating the ancient masters and little me. And we are closer to hope, that little caterpillar in my heart's cocoon, that I might take