My mother always defined herself as a writer, although her published writings were sparse.  She wrote one book under her own steam, a memoir about her time in Paris the year before I was born, and then, after my father died, various small books about personal health, which were an assignment from a publisher.  Otherwise she mostly just wrote encyclopedia entries. She was always pushing me to write, something in which I had minimal interest. I hated school and I hated writing term papers, but I will always be eternally grateful to her for (after watching me struggle – at the age of 10 – to write a rather lengthy term paper by hand, in what’s now referred to as “cursive”) walking me over to her manual typewriter and showing me that even if I only typed with two fingers, I could put thoughts on paper faster than I would if I wrote by hand, and my hand would get less tired.  A few weeks later, she started teaching me how to touch type.  Many people my age brag about how they refused to learn to type because they did want to be (eeew) secretaries, but I can say with gratitude that because I learned to type, I got a good job as a secretary, which led to a decent job as an editor, with nothing but a high school diploma, and that I never had to work in food services or retail at a minimum wage with no benefits.

          I think my mother had dreams and projections not so much about my writing, as about my being a writer: the kind who didn’t care about fashion and didn’t wear makeup, but rather wore large hoop earrings and hideous open toe sandals in the summer, and grew into young adulthood dating scruffy men with beards (when I was in grade school, a number of college-age girls we knew who wrote poetry were this type). To me this would have been a fate worse than death and the thought of ending up this way just compounded my dislike of schoolwork (although as I got older I read quite a lot of serious literature).

The only thing I remember working hard at as a teenager (other than my three or four unsuccessful attempts at dieting; I would lose 30 pounds and gain it back every other year until I was 18) was playing the piano.  I practiced really really hard and entered several competitions for young people.  I even got to the semi-finals in one. I was also interested in singing and had spent my childhood imitating Julie Andrews, but wires got crossed and when I was 13 or 14, a few weeks after a music teacher friend of my mother’s told us that I had an exceptional singing voice, I started smoking because I had heard that it would spoil my appetite. (I returned to singing twice: once at 26 after I quit smoking the first time, and again, permanently at 54, and it has been an obsession ever since.)

          I also began writing when I was 54.  I was in a state of unrequited lust over the gay man who had encouraged me to sing,* and the story of him and me was spinning around in my head, but I couldn’t talk about it out loud because I didn’t know anyone who didn’t either know me in connection with my partner Betty or know me from work. So I turned the episode into a play.  The play mirrored the real situation almost word for word (this man had said some absolutely ridiculous and smarmy things, and it was healing to read them out loud and laugh), but I didn’t think any audience would believe that a woman in her 50s living in New York could be that stupid or naïve, so I changed the demographics so that the heroine was in her 20s and living in Texas.  The play turned out to be a rather amusing RomCom and was produced at a community theater in Texas. (It has since languished because I just don’t think it will pass muster during the Me Too era.) 

          I gave my mother a copy, which she kept in her bedroom. As a point of comparison, she kept a young male friend’s novel-in-progress, which she and I both agreed was pretentiously opaque, on her coffee table in the living room, perhaps because it was “postmodern” and added to her image of herself, whereas having a daughter who wrote the theatrical equivalent of a “chick flick” did not.

          As I was writing the play, I certainly didn’t think of myself as having homework.  I felt that a devil was behind me with a pitchfork, and maybe one was: the man I was writing about looked a lot like Mephistopheles even down to owning an orange leather suit! I felt so compelled to write that I spent my lunch hours and time on subway platforms scribbling in a notebook and then came home and transferred what I had written to a computer file.

            My first experience with writing-as-homework was when a therapist told me I would feel less blocked (as a person working at home in a dull job, not as a writer, per se) if I “did” The Artist’s Way**. This program included writing three pages in longhand (which considering the size and childishness of my handwriting meant that they would contain less prose than most people’s) every morning.  I suppose I “cheated” because I had coffee and fed the cats first, but it was a useful exercise.  Doing that led me to decide to write a memoir.

          I now write something every day: a bit of memoir, a blog post, pieces for this writing competition. I found that it is not that hard if I just sit down and do it. On the other hand, if someone asked me “who are you?” “a writer” is probably the last thing I would say. And if someone asks me “what do you doooo” (an irksome question for those of us who may have had interesting lives but never had an interesting job) I say “I sing”. I probably spend more hours of the day writing, or copy editing to earn money, than singing, but never mind.  It is when I am singing that I feel most alive. Most people I meet for the first time ask me if I am some kind of performer because I always wear “stage makeup,” even to the laundry room. If I were going to “be” something I would much rather be a singer (big hair, perfect posture) than a writer (snarled hair, round shoulders).  Although of course the world has moved on and writers look all sorts of ways, particularly since many of them these days end up as talking heads on television.

          The best thing about writing is it is a way to leave a legacy.  I wouldn’t even have to be published; I could just put instructions on how to access my computer files in my will. Mostly I write because I don’t want to die anonymous. Which is a good reason for giving myself “homework”.

[*He is mentioned at the beginning of my earlier piece “Periphery”babydramatic-1950.dreamwidth.org/4090.html

** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Artist%27s_Way]

I don't have a lot of free time, because I still have to do a little editing here at my laptop to earn a living, but there's always time to write!

(And I see here, typing in Rich Text, that I don't have to do the kind of html coding that I used to sweat over, and which took me weeks to learn!) Here is a link to a Youtube video of me singing "Mon Coeur".