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Model #6

Writing Out from the Chrysalis

Long ago and far away, a tiny egg appeared in the Land of Literacy. This egg contained the future hopes of a culture that valued reading, writing, and other academic learning. The egg was one among millions of similar eggs, but the culture knew it was important to nurture each one. Fresh and untainted by its surroundings, the egg lay incubating on its leaf of origin until, one day, a fledgling emerged from the egg’s protection—me. If the structured plan of the culture was realized, I would become a Literate and be allowed all the privileges of the other Literates: I would read, write, and communicate with the others in my community. But first I would endure the stages of development that transforms ordinary caterpillars into magnificent butterflies. My path was shadowed by peril, but I determined to learn the skills of Literacy and write out from my chrysalis.

My first experience with writing began sometime around first grade. One early homework assignment was to fill a page with capital A’s. I transformed my mother’s treadle sewing machine cabinet into a desk and sat down to complete my task. I skipped the neighborhood baseball game because writing was more important. I was learning that for me, writing the symbols that were the basis for written language was difficult.

I remember one day that my first grade class practiced writing the letter "D." I carefully penciled capital and lower case letters across the paper. Then it happened—my pencil lead broke. A dark line pierced the side of one of the letters and graphite smudged another. My heart pounded as I turned the pencil over and began to erase the mess. I was almost finished when my left hand let the paper slip across the desk and over the inkwell hole. The eraser poked through the paper and left a jagged puncture. All I could do was try to make the letters near the tear as clear as possible and hand the paper in. I walked to the front of the room. I knew that the teacher would grade my paper for neatness. But as I silently gave her the paper, she said, "What’s this?" She put the paper in front of her face and looked at me through the hole, her brown eye gleaming. Then she tossed the paper on her desk and scrawled a fiery red "F" at the top. She never saw my rows of D’s. At the end of the day, the teacher passed our papers back to us. I hid mine in my coat pocket until I climbed the steps on the bus. When I thought that no one was looking, I stuffed it down between my seat and the window.

Writing—penmanship—is still a problem for me after decades. But for as long as I can remember, I have loved communicating through symbols that come alive under the eyes of other people. It is necessary to observe the mechanics of writing, but writing is much more. Writing is a process that hungers for expression, grows with mind and experience, and results in the shed skin of outgrown thoughts and methods. Then, as with the caterpillar’s molting, the cycle begins anew.
In the Land of Literacy, writing is a skill that requires nourishment. I devoured books, drank grammar, and snacked on spelling. I was a good student who learned to write as an outgrowth of voracious reading and a desire to do well in school. My responsibility was to eat and grow. I ate the building blocks of writing and learned to expect that I would outgrow my skin, molt, and grow again. A caterpillar molts five times before emerging from the chrysalis. My metamorphosis as a writer is less predictable yet somewhat analogous.

My first molting must have happened when I learned to write a sentence. Almost at the same time, paragraphs became important. Then I was required to write book reports, which meant that I learned to combine paragraphs into short essays. My early writing experiences were almost all products of reading and listening, and then regurgitating facts. There didn’t seem to be much demand for what I was thinking, In eighth grade, I learned to type, and I again outgrew my writing skin. Because I was able to type so much faster than I could write longhand, I began to dream of sitting at a typewriter and writing a book. I wasted countless sheets of paper on beginning my novel. I didn’t have a story to tell—there was no novel to write.

Near the end of that year, my attention was diverted to a different project. My brother was injured in a serious car accident and could not complete his Advanced Biology research paper. He wouldn’t be allowed to graduate from high school unless the paper was finished. One weekend in May, I copied and edited his handwritten manuscript. His twenty-page paper on evolution whetted my appetite to write one of my own. The task of typing his paper triggered another growth spurt, and I hungered for my next meal.

As I grew older, I found ways to express myself beyond trite essays and fill-in-the-blank answers. While in junior and senior high school, I was elected to serve as secretary for organizations like National Honor Society and the local chapter of the Order of the Rainbow for Girls. These offices were honors, and the work didn’t require much thought. But I had to write reports that made sense, thus making use of the mechanical and grammatical tools that I had accumulated as a student of writing.
Mildred Gamble was the most influential teacher in my writing life. As an English literature teacher, she was a brilliant light. As a creative writing teacher, she was an electric current flowing through a safely insulated cord that she plugged into her students. She taught us different forms of writing and encouraged us to experiment. Most of all, she encouraged us to look within and outside ourselves and to think about what we observed. Because of Mrs. Gamble’s classes, I developed a burning desire to write that has never been extinguished despite long periods of my life in which I have written very little. Thus another period of growth had forced me to shed the old writer’s skin.

When my seventh child was three months old, I began taking night classes. I don’t really remember what I wrote or if I wrote during the fourteen years after graduation. I was too busy, though I did read a lot. With a good high school education behind me, and maturity gained through marriage and mothering the first seven of my eventual nine children, I thought I was ready to shed my skin and molt again. Not so. I registered for a composition placement exam at Colorado State University believing that I was a competent writer and would easily test out of the required freshmen composition class. Out of several hundred new students, only two passed, and I was not one of them. I felt humiliated, yet I enrolled in the class and learned composition techniques that continue to serve well. During the same semester, I studied other subjects as well. My history professor praised my writing and told me that synthesis was one of its strengths. This seems to be a pivotal point in my self-concept—I began to believe that I could become a writer.

The effort to digest college-level writing allowed me to move on to a new stage of writing. But this time my new skin formed a chrysalis, and I anchored it to the desire to write so that I would not be blown about in the winds of uncertainty. And a good thing I did, because discouragement, diversions, intrusions, and distractions blasted from the four corners of the Land of Literacy with a vengeance. Before I settled down to write seriously, another nine years passed. Two more children were born, my family moved to southeastern Idaho, children grew up and began to leave home, others needed extra attention, my father died, and I became severely depressed. Journaling became my literal lifeline, my connection with reality and myself. I climbed out of the darkness slowly, over a period of years.
Then my youngest child was ready for first grade and my husband began a job in Oregon. Fearing a relapse, I enrolled fulltime at Idaho State University as a piano performance major. I again experienced success with writing, this time in the genre of music appreciation and history, and growing confidence in my potential to become a writer fanned the embers of my desire. After nine years in Idaho, I moved to Oregon.

For years I had wanted to write a book but had no idea what it would be about. I needed to spend time incubating knowledge and experience in order to find a story to tell. I remember when the idea struck. It happened the summer before moving to Oregon. I was half asleep in the passenger seat as my family drove home from a visit to Colorado. I was silently chiding myself for thinking that I had anything worth writing about, and I asked myself, "What do I really know?" The paperless exercise of brainstorming resulted in a prologue in just a few days. A year later, after establishing our home in Oregon, I had the time and space in which to work. I decided to write in a genre that I knew—the cozy mystery—but I didn’t want to wait to learn conventional methods of going about it. With the kids away at school, I sat down at the computer and began Hunter on the Sly-. I did not have an outline or know who the villain was. After driving the kids to school each day, I came home to write for hours. By the beginning of April, my rough draft was complete. I molted.

The written word has no meaning unless it is read. I asked family members to read my manuscript, and they told me that they thought it was good. But of course, my family may not always be honest critics—they don’t want to hurt my feelings. I began to reach out in my new community and found a group of writers who met to share and critique their work. I attended a writing seminar given by Bill Johnson, author of A Story is a Promise. After he read the beginning of my novel, he told me that he loved the prologue but the first chapter should be thrown out, except for crucial background information that could be incorporated later in the book. It took me months to reconcile with his advice.
When I discovered that Left Coast Crime, a convention of mystery readers, writers, and publishers, would meet in Portland, I registered and spent a weekend listening to successful authors discuss their craft. Some of my favorites authors, like J.A. Jance and Mary Daheim, became accessible—human—though I also felt that I was privileged to touch the hems of their garments. The success of so many writers—at least one hundred published authors took part in the convention—revitalized my desire to publish.

During the time between the move to Oregon and beginning my book, I began to write poetry again. The desert environment was my inspiration, and I was compelled to describe it metaphorically. "Markings" inspired a young composer to write music, using the poem as lyrics, that was performed several times at University of Nevada-Las Vegas. When Sam Western presented a poetry seminar to my writing group, I thought I knew what I was getting into. His one point was that the poet must become accessible to the reader by exposing her own personal emotions. My poetry changed in a marked way as a result of the seminar, becoming more personal and, I believe, more relevant. Cascade Reader, a regional literary journal, published one of these newer poems. I risked entering a small contest and won a prize. Soon another poem was accepted for publication, and two more will be published in anthologies this fall. A few more are included in Anthology 2003, a collection of writing by Harney Basin Writers and invited guests that I compiled, edited and printed last spring.

As a result of minor successes with poetry, I began to think that if I made the effort, I could find an agent interested in helping me publish my book. I agonized over writing a query letter. Most agent responses were negative. But three asked to see part or all of my manuscript, along with a synopsis that I had not yet written. When I passed my work over the post office counter, my stomach threatened to implode. Two agents declined to contract their services yet offered to read my book again if I had it professionally edited. A third told me that my query had intrigued him, but the book was a disappointment. In addition, he told me that books beginning with prologues have weak plots. I was devastated.

So here I am at the end of fifty years of life, studying writing in college to gain the knowledge and confidence necessary to burst from the chrysalis and pump creativity into my unfurled wings. Each stage of development has required nourishment, growth and the subsequent molting of old skin. The exposure of tender new skin brings both freedom and pain, but I have learned that molting is a necessary part of the writing life. As I change inside my chrysalis, I have time to explore this genesis:"What you seek, lies within."*

Gently, gently, I say:
Traverse the desert midst songs of night,
coyotes galloping, howling pursuit;
owls silent sink into terrified prey;
rabbit screams piercing the darkness.
Softly, softly, I say:
Tread over mountains through icy windblasts;
claim each breath with mind-conquered pain;
stand at the summit pierced by arrows of light;
wait for the echoes of ancients.
Listen, listen, I say:
Travel the highways of innermost voice;
look for the fork where you chose your last turn;
enter the gate of the lost-treasure world;
and find what you seek—the poetry of words.
Of course, I may be a moth struggling with a cocoon rather than a butterfly inside a chrysalis. But no matter how my wings are patterned, I know that I am a Literate who is writing out from the chrysalis (or cocoon). I look forward to joining the Literacy community.

*Title from the 2002 Writer’s Digest Calendar of writing prompts; poem by Donna Evans.