I am often asked how I got to where I am now. I honestly don’t know how to answer this question. I didn’t take a conventional route. I didn’t go to college. I didn’t enter an MFA program. I’m not certified for anything. But here I am. Teaching and writing and still hoping for the best.
My path to this place was windy and dark at times, puzzling almost always, disappointing and discouraging and hard, and it’s still all those things. My main gig (day job in the language of artists) for most of my adult life was cleaning houses for a living. I did this, off and on, for over a decade. Believe it or not, it’s an integral part of who I am as a writer, but I often find that people don’t want to hear about it. They see my house-cleaning gig as some sort of dues that I paid, but not as the education itself.
But it was the education. As were all my jobs. Here are some of them: costumer, stall mucker, newspaper deliverer, carpenter, sales clerk, bartender, waitress, milker on a dairy farm, assistant drum maker, cocktail waitress, waitress – I could go on. I’m sure I’m leaving some off.
I was raised in white suburbia. I truly didn’t know physical hardship as a child. I didn’t know much of anything. I was the youngest girl child of a preacher’s daughter and the church’s organist. My family was “traditional.” My mother stayed home. My father went to work and provided for us. The planned trajectory for my life was that I would go to college after high school and meet and marry someone. I was supposed to live in suburbia and have children and not work outside the home and there would be a woman who came weekly to clean my house. Funny how things work out, isn’t it?
I wasn’t very good at school. I couldn’t get accepted to a college and didn’t want to go anyway. And the sixties had come along, and I’d smoked marijuana and had my mind expanded, and so on. I entered the work-a-day world after high school, and I met people I never would have met otherwise. Now more than ever I know it was exactly what I needed in order to become a fiction writer. Without this, what would I be writing? How would I know the things I know? More importantly, how could I imagine what I need to imagine if I didn’t have some hard-work experience under my belt, if I hadn’t known a little fear about making the rent check, if I hadn’t stood on my feet eight hours a day, if I hadn’t hit my thumb with a hammer on a cold morning? Writing is about the physical world, and my life doing physical work has helped me a great deal with that.
I’m not discouraging anyone from going to college or entering an MFA program if that’s what she or he wants to do, but every path is different. That’s the first thing you need to understand. Your writing path, or art path, is not the same as any one else’s. Know that and make it your own.
