Out into the World

My first publication came at age nine–a sternly worded letter to the editor of my local paper admonishing the high school boys who had, the night before, stolen pumpkins from the porch of our house. I remember hearing them run up outside, stealing the pumpkins, and smashing them in the street out front. Ours was a quiet street; many of our neighbors had lived there since my dad was a kid growing up in the house next door. These weren’t Russell Street hooligans. They’d come from somewhere else.

I was so angry about the injustice of it. My rage was larger than my nine-year-old body could contain; the year before I’d seen a school counselor about anger management when I called my third grade teacher a bitch. I’ve written about that HERE. Righteous indignation wasn’t new to me, but I needed somewhere for it to go. Enter my brilliant mother who suggested I write a letter to the editor of The Salina Journal. I sat down at our dining room table facing a large window from which you could view the street–the scene of the crime. Trusty pencil and notebook paper in hand, I got to work.

That was the first time I saw my name in print next to something I’d written. It was a jolt to know I’d chosen the words, put them in a specific order, planned the sentences, sent them out into the world, and someone I’d never met decided they should be read by other people. Someone who wouldn’t know me from any other nine-year-old with a mullet–it was 1985 after all–decided my words deserved printing. I was hooked.

I kept writing, though not for anyone else’s eyes, for years. In high school I saw my name in print again on copy in the yearbook and on bylines for the school paper. I wrote about Magic Johnson and the AIDS crisis, the complete ridiculousness of standardized test scores as measures of intelligence, and any other topic I could get Mr. Myers to agree to. He encouraged my voice and let me tell the stories I thought were important. I’ll be forever grateful for that.

There are years of journals stashed in a corner of my house today. They are neither consistent nor coherent. Some entries in hot pink ink from freshman year of high school are so cringey they should likely be burned, but I can’t part with them. Others have huge gaps in time and cognition, written when I was trying to put my life together or trying not to with the help of too much booze. In any case, I’ve been putting words on paper, or on a digital document, for as long as I can remember. But submitting work for publication took a long hiatus from age nine to age 36 when Blood Lotus chose “Resurrection”, as the last piece in their spring 2012 issue (page 50). I was a year and a half divorced and had told friends all I needed was a win. When I got the notice that the piece had been accepted, I felt a validation that my voice mattered that I hadn’t felt in awhile.

There have been small publications here and there for years though nothing as powerful as having my chapbook accepted and published by Finishing Line Press in 2020. That experience was such a gift, though the book launch fell a little flat thanks to this little thing called a pandemic we’ve been in for far longer than any of us imagined.

But, though I want desperately to be published and write full time and teach workshops when I choose, the thought of sending out work and waiting months and months for a response is simply overwhelming. I want to do it, but I don’t have the energy most days. And writing anything new, outside of this space, has proven a challenge over the last two years. How can the blank page be filled with new words when my day to day is just a jumble of “what’s for dinner” and “there’s that asshole still acting like an asshole on tv again.”

Today, I decided looking forward might require looking back. I dug through things I wrote in what feels like another life and edited and revised one particular stone until it shone, polishing it into a new piece that might find life somewhere beyond the folder on my desktop. I submitted it, friends, and I feel hopeful as a flock of geese winging south, seeking warmer weather, a new spot to land, the chance to begin again. I can’t know if anyone will want it, but I know my voice matters even if they don’t.

As Kate Bowler writes in No Cure for Being Human, “We live and we are loved and we are gone.” In the spaces between, if there are words to say, I hope you choose to say them. I hope you put them out into the world.