Age 23 (cont.): I have the good fortune of being allowed, as an English Master's student, to take graduate-level creative writing classes for my electives. There's room in my schedule for three electives during the 2-year program, and I take three creative writing courses: one in poetry, one in fiction, and one in nonfiction. Probably the most encouraging comment I've ever gotten on my writing comes from the well-known poet and memoirist who teaches the nonfiction class: holding up the personal essay I've given him to look over, flapping the pages at me as if to get my attention, he says, “Do you even know how good this is?”
Age 24: My poetry professor encourages everyone to write formal poems – terza rima, ghazal, sonnet. Most of what I produce in this class is dismally, abysmally bad.
Age 25: I attend Writers @ Work in the summer of 1999. Lucy Grealy – who, later that same summer, will start using heroin, entering a spiral of self-destructive behavior that will kill her before she sees 40 – is teaching a class on memoir writing. I've submitted the same personal essay one of my professors praised two years ago. Although she can't possibly know that this is an old piece I'm recycling, Lucy seems to intuit that I'm freezing up. To everyone's surprise, and to palpable envy from my workshop classmates, she says, “This is a great essay. There's really nothing this writer needs to fix. In fact, it could probably get published, just as it is.” Then, to me, she adds, “It's like a perfectly executed finger-warming exercise on the piano. Now, move on.”
Age 26: Instead of moving on, I enter a 5-year creative hiatus. But, on the upside, my academic writing flourishes. I'm awarded a $10K fellowship, and all I have to do is write an 8-page paper on Nabokov's Lolita and present it at the Humanities Institute symposium.
Age 27: I write lots of long letters to a friend and former professor of mine. I also begin freelance editing, which, after I stop teaching, will become a “career” of sorts.
Age 28: I write two articles for the Oxford Encyclopedia. It takes me all summer. I'm paid $700.
Age 29: I live with my family in Denmark for a semester, during which time Tyler studies Scandinavian architecture, Everest attends 2nd grade at an International School, and I utterly fail to make progress on my Ph.D. dissertation. In those four months, I produce a grand total of 5 pages of notes on Faulkner and a one-page allegory about a woman who decides to give up chocolate.
Age 30: For my birthday, a friend books me a massage. During the session, I confess to the massage therapist that I hate academic writing, that my real love is creative writing. He tells me I must get myself a copy of The Artist's Way, so I do. For the next several months, I faithfully follow Julia Cameron's advice.
Age 31: Although I'm still not really writing, I teach a free poetry-writing class. My “students” are my friends and neighbors.
Age 32: One of my friends is thinking about taking a class in photography, and I'm worried about it, because taking classes in writing has ruined me as a writer. My friend doesn't buy this logic, and challenges me to take up poetry again. So I do.
Age 33: I attend Writers @ Work for the second time. For my nonfiction workshop, I've written a new personal essay. For my individual session, I've submitted ten new poems. The essay gets a basically positive response. The poetry gets a more cautiously positive response.
Age 34: After a horrendous falling-out with my best friend, I embark on a self-designed course in Narrative Therapy. She and I eventually manage to patch things up.
Age 35: I spend several months writing for one hour a day, five days a week, on a topic selected at random from a sugar bowl. The topics are actually just words (e.g., green, destruction, art, duplicity) that I've written on little strips of paper.
Age 36: For about 9 months, I keep an anonymous blog, averaging over a dozen entries each month. It's the first time I've written both prolifically and for quasi-public consumption. It's also the first time I have enjoyed the process more than the product.
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