Message in a Bottle

I am an apprentice writer now even though I’m an 85-year-old great-grandmother. My learning to be a writer began years ago with the mechanics. In second grade in a small Oklahoma town, I was taught Spencerian penmanship, using the kind of pen that I dipped in an inkwell on my desk. I had to make rows of connected, overlapping ovals and more rows of connecting slanting lines, keeping all my strokes inside two horizontal lines. When I ruined a pen point with too much pressure, I had to take it out and slip in a replacement. Oh, yes, and be careful not to get ink on my dress. My classroom was in one of four one-room bungalows at the end of the dirt road that went by my house .

The first content I had to write, painstakingly, were compulsory thank-you notes to my aunts. Learning spelling started with learning to read and went on for life. Sixth grade brought learning grammar by diagraming the parts of speech of sentences, and being taught how to punctuate. I learned how to write content with written homework assignments, term papers and essay exams, all before spell checkers and cut-and-paste revision techniques. Erasers were indispensable. I hand-wrote these things.

In high school I took a journalism class because it fit my schedule and filled a requirement for an elective. It was in high school that I tried to escape using penmanship by taking a class in typing. I then had to deal with carbon paper, correction fluid, and my lack of manual dexterity. My children were amused to discover that it was a myth that I had always made A’s. They found my report cards in my scrapbook with my only ever D — in typing. But I got the journalism award at my graduation ceremony.

I went to a small college in Missouri my first two years. As a sophomore I was invited to work for an English teacher correcting lecture notes the freshmen were required to take for a humanities survey course. Building on my high school experience, I was coeditor of the college paper where, in the print shop I watched one of my schoolmates operate the linotype machine and another one construct headlines from lead type mounted on wood blocks. I learned proofreaders’ marks and to proofread galley proofs, among other things. I also had a few late night trysts after curfew in the dark printshop, but I never got caught, and I didn’t write about them either.

I took required courses in literature and read lots of books, but I never considered a career as a writer. I majored in economics when I transferred to Ohio State for my final two years.
Later, when I traveled with my husband and children, I would write to my parents about our trips. Mother would send those accounts to her sisters in their round robin letter, and my aunts began to say I should send them to a magazine to be published. I tried but gave it up after a few rejections slips. I had a very tender ego.
After we spent a couple years in Germany as a military family, I wrote about some of our experiences. This time rejection letters inspired me to take a correspondence course in magazine article writing. I chose the University of Wisconsin. I produced a piece that made it into the Sunday supplement of the Daily Oklahoman and even paid me a little money, but my articles about Germany still didn’t go anywhere.

Somewhere in there I started keeping a journal. I wrote a few poems in it. I was in my late thirties when I enrolled in a summer course in short-story writing at Oklahoma City University. I’d been pretty much a straight A student in college, so when I got a B, I again gave up the idea of writing for publication. Perfectionism is one of my faults.

I married and started a family soon after I got my economics degree, so I had no career as an economist, only a year as a key punch operator and processor of labor statistics. After 20 years as just-a-housewife and a doctor’s wife, I got a job as a caseworker in a welfare department in Annapolis, where I wrote progress notes on my clients. After two years of that I went to graduate school, this time in Maryland, to learn more about how to do that difficult job. I liked life as a student and chose to go on for a Ph.D in the field of psychology, which was awarded to me when I was fifty.

I worked for twenty years as a psychologist and loved it. I wrote hundreds more pages of progress notes. I finally retired at age 70 to a farm that I had bought, a place where I could live sustainably and self-sufficiently. From my farm in rural Pennsylvania I wrote a letter to the editor of the small-town, local weekly newspaper, commenting on something he wrote in his column. In response he invited me to write a column, which I did, a column about environmental issues. He also printed some of my poems.

I wrote more poems, but had no formal training. Then a new friend encouraged me to submit some poems to a new writing contest she was starting. I did, and over several years I won with a number of my poems. I wanted to be a better poet, so I went to the University of Wisconsin distance learning program again and studied writing poetry by mail for a couple years and then online another year.

After going to a Saturday poetry workshop given by a professor at the small local Juniata College, I persuaded that prof to tutor me for another couple of years. One year he invited me to give the annual poetry reading evening at the college. I was 78 by then. I was invited to give more readings. My daughter was impressed and had my poems published in a very professional-looking little book. I illustrated it with sketches. (Mother intended for me to be an artist, but I only got a B in that class in high school).

So I’m finally ready to tell you about my current, real apprenticeship as a writer. After I moved from my farm to a retirement community back in Maryland when I was 81, my Juniata poetry tutor, still working with me by email, was telling me my poems were no longer poetry and that I should try prose. I had begun to take my turn at speaking for programs, and was so successful with what I wrote and then read about my experiences, that I decided to try writing a memoir.

I researched writing memoirs, and the best by far of the five or six books I found and read was Bill Roorbach’s book, Writing Life Stories. So I contacted him, then sent him a couple chapters I had written (and read as programs for this place where I now live). He agreed to take me on and be my consultant for writing the story of my life.

So I am finally an apprentice writer. Bill is very encouraging and a wonderful teacher. His criticism inspires me instead of making me angry, a real gift. He says he thinks my memoir will be publishable. I’d like that, of course, but more important is that I love writing it. So far I’ve never had writer’s block, just frustration that I can’t free up more time to write. I’m working on the second draft. My goal is to finish my memoir before my memory goes. Bill keeps suggesting topics for more books for me to write when I finish this one. He must think I’m immortal.