WHAT EVERY WRITER DREAMS ABOUT & IF IT HAPPENED TO ME, IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU
CHEATERS INC. & DUMB LUCK LTD. Part 3 From The Chapter – The Dream
From about age sixteen, I wanted to be a writer, though not so much to have to write. I flunked H.S. freshman English with all its chattering about punctuation, spelling, gerunds, and dangling participles; I even had to go to summer school, where I managed a C-. Yep, not so much to write as to “have written.”
My first big wave of “making it” occurred when I was still too young to realize it was happening. Reading my poems on Seattle’s KPBX public radio program while still an undergraduate student and having a young co-ed tell me she was embroidering a decorative pillow with a line from one of my poems were signs of success that I didn’t yet appreciate or recognize. I wanted to be famous and beloved and maybe even earn enough money to avoid having to work at jobs I didn’t like, which happened to be anything except writing what I wanted to write, which has never amounted to work for me.
Though making money mattered little, recognition of my writing mattered greatly to me. Being recognized, even though it was not on the household name level of recognition, was encouraging and kept me writing in my early years despite feeling anything I wrote mattered little.
Right after college, being published in small press magazines in both the U.S. and Australia, where I lived for a couple of years, gave me a Hemingway-type sensibility about myself. Some of the editors of these small press magazines were famous award-winning poets and writers themselves, and their interest in accepting and publishing my poems felt good and allowed me a tiny glimpse of success, but nothing like what was coming later. Still, making it is something that happens to you and inside you, whether you can see and feel it or not. I wanted fame, a lot of money, and gorgeous women lining up to touch the hems of my garments.
Skip ahead to a little over thirty years later.
No, I mean it. You can skip those decades when I earned my livelihood in many jobs, most of which eventually fired me. I plunked away at writing, mostly poetry, where the proper use of punctuation, spelling, gerunds, and dangling stuff didn’t matter so much. Despite my promising early start and success, I felt like a failure as a writer.
Like Charles Bukowski and many other writers, who eventually achieved success, things hadn’t gone quite the way I planned. A lot of pretty bad things happened to me, many of which I brought on myself, some not so much but occurred anyway. While surviving these things (sometimes just barely surviving), I gathered writing material: unique and horrifying.
I gave up writing for a decade, from my mid-twenties to thirties, until my son Sheehan was born. He rapidly displayed profound disabilities. Sheehan wasn’t just “developmentally delayed.” There wasn’t any “delay,” as in, “your flight is delayed.” Sheehan’s plane would NEVER land. After several years of suicidal ideation and self-pity, I returned to writing with a new mission and new passion and told Sheehan’s and my story.
So, the story of how I “made it” is the story of Sheehan because had he not been born as messed-up as he was, I’d have never written my novel Stuck in Neutral, which launched my author career at age fifty-two. The worst thing to happen to me was a predicate to the best thing. Go figure. Life huh?