Dear Reader,

I’ve been flipping through the “record bins” of my early writing lately and found this not-so-golden oldie.

It’s from circa 2008, written for one of my undergraduate classes. (Apparently we were asked to write “in the style of” different authors. This was my attempt at Truman Capote??)

I’m going to disappear while you read this thing calling itself a story when it’s actually a ?? And whatever you do, don’t tell Word Raccoon about it. She’ll fall off her bookshelf laughing at my early efforts. (Actually, I couldn’t make it all the way through; too embarrassing. I did get the sensation, reading it, of being crushed into a phone booth with about a dozen other people talking all at once.)

Part of me wants to apologize for every adjective.

Maybe every other adjective.

Reading it now, I alternated between hiding behind the sofa cushions and smiling. Every sentence seems determined to become the Most Important Sentence in the paragraph. Younger Drema had apparently declared war on white space.

But I also recognized myself.

I see early WR in here, struggling to emerge.

Even then I was writing about where stories come from, whether writers discover stories or invent them, and what it feels like to carry around more words than one person can reasonably hold. Evidently I’ve been preoccupied with the same questions for a very long time.

I trust readers more now. I don’t feel the need to stack metaphor upon metaphor until the sentence starts wheezing, so there’s that.

WR’s paw prints were there, even then, in:

The tomatoes. The Earl Grey. The conviction that stories are living things.

The writer I eventually became was already in there. She just hadn’t learned yet that readers don’t need twelve metaphors when one good tomato will do.

Anyway, here’s 2008 Drema. Be kind, please. She was trying very hard, and she had a long way to go. 

                 A Mother of a Story (Capote version)

         Sometimes a story shook Kate awake like a frightened child, begging immediate attention, breath coming heavy from between endearingly quivering lips, sleepy, long-lashed eyelids nearly closed, a tear licking down a sleep-greased cheek, whispering things like “There was a man.  A big, scary man.”  Just as tenderly as a mother she propped up on her pillow and “listened” into her spiral-bound notebook, Write Brothers pen moving as seriously as if she were taking notes at a board meeting.  Or they followed her into the shower where it was a bit more awkward to scribble the details, causing her to dance with her washcloth to try covering herself.  “I lived in Italy until I was 105,” an invisible man’s voice might say, or, “I loved her, but I never told her because…”  They jostled one another, stories crossing, fading in and out like stars at night, the more intriguing for their interruptions.

         The reason the stories visited her and not someone else was they sensed her willingness to hear, saw how she cherished the seed of a pinecone, and how she thrilled to smell mimosas near Father’s Day, their peachy scent not just a luxury, but a necessity, watched how she salted and ate a ripe beefsteak tomato with a knife and fork, as if it had given its life for her and she was thankful.  The stories felt how she allowed emotions to rise to just beneath her skin like pulse beats after sex.  They came to her, these voices and tales, speaking of things that had been, were, and would be, and she did not sort them, did not reject them, and, most importantly, did not judge them.  Instead, she traced them with her pen.  These words were not her own creation, as some supposed. Something, somewhere, somehow sent her these as if she were a transcriptionist.  Or, as she suspected, they dwelt everywhere and she alone listened.

         Everyplace carried its burden of stories.  Some she did try to avoid, because they were so incredibly dark, but they looked so forlorn she’d end up inviting them into her kitchen for warm zucchini bread and a painted mug of Earl Grey.  “Sit, tell me all about it,” she’d say, and they would. 

Gradually she would realize she hadn’t spoken in days.  When people spoke, she saw words and wrote her responses, unwilling to break too long with the world she simultaneously craved and despised.  The stories became more real than people.  She ran out of paper and began writing on the walls, mumbling into the dark as more and more stories came to her, as if they were refugees from a famine-stricken country.  Frantically she began writing on her body, as if to show them how committed she was.  They demanded more.  The ones that seemed most urgent she had tattooed on, but more kept begging room, pushing and shoving like desperately ill people at a tent revival.  The tattoos felt heavier and heavier, like layers of paint on a canvas. 

Finally, she could handle no more.  “Enough!” she screamed, but it was too late.  Her skin began to shrink, bubble, and split.  It rolled down her like a too-small pair of panty hose, revealing her core: nothing but a shining column of words, like a vertical of Scrabble letters.  And the she she was was gone to find someone to share her story, if only there was someone who would. 

See? I still cringe in places. But I also feel strangely fond of the young writer who believed every sentence had to carry the weight of the world.

Thankfully, I received expert writing advice at the time, and I hope (oh, please say I have) improved since then. 

More importantly, I kept writing.

Looking back, I’m less interested in how much I’ve changed than in how much has remained the same. The seeds were already there. They’ve simply had years to grow.

To tender beginnings that grow on the vine.

Drema