The anticipation begins on a winter morning when I pick up my pen and open a journal.
Black, hard-bound artists’ notebooks are the best; unlined is essential. Usually I’ve started the day by reading part of an essay or perhaps a poem, waiting for a word or a phrase to ignite the tiniest sense of an idea. When it happens, which is unpredictable, I’m eager for that inkling of possibility to pull me from here, in my present life sitting with my morning coffee at a wooden table looking out a window, to there, another place, another time, another subject that I need to explore on paper.
My writing life is often completely solitary. I’ve filled stacks of those beautiful black notebooks that now line the shelves of my work room, written my share of academic essays, and submitted a number of articles for publication in newspapers and journals, all by just sitting down and doing it. But my writing has also, over the years, led to forging strong connections with other writers.
My career as an educator focused significantly on teaching writing. More recently, in my Vermont retirement, I have found meaningful ways to work with older writers eager to finally take advantage of new-found time to create on paper the essays, poems and stories they’ve somehow saved up for years — aimed toward children and grandchildren, but also, for many, meant for publication to a larger audience.
The memory of my fellow writer Julie, originally a Midwesterner, and her stories about reinventing herself as a local in a little town in Vermont, inspires me regularly and takes me back to years of Monday mornings with a group of writing women gathered around my dining room table. There, Susan transported us week by week to a rural community in Africa, where she had served as a visiting midwife under extreme conditions that in these later years sparked essays about incredible loss and unimaginable beauty.
Barb’s tales of college summers working by day at a Colorado resort and doing 1950s-style mischief by night with her girlfriends make me laugh even now. Of course I can’t forget perhaps the best writer among us, who composed with grace and compassion a book-length manuscript about her husband’s avowed mission to beat the devastations of Alzheimer’s disease — and the shattering impossibility of his goal.
That group, a dynamic sisterhood emerging from two classes I had taught through the Dartmouth ILEAD program shortly after moving to Vermont, was a striking example both of the personal significance of the act of writing and of the importance of joining with others in a community of writers. Being intimately connected like this can enhance creativity. In the presence of others hard at work, we are inspired. Further, getting critical feedback lets us know how alive we are as writers. And having an audience heightens our awareness of who we are.
One of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, asks in a familiar work, “What are you doing with your one wild and precious life?” My answer is, I am writing — and appreciating the rewards of that pursuit. Scribbling in a notebook, alone in the morning or around a table with other writers, is ultimately identity insurance. On paper, writers declare themselves out loud. By being bold, they invite conversations with a larger community. As they tell their stories or persuade others to consider their opinions, writers reject the isolation of anonymity.
Mary Otto lives in Norwich.