Unexpected

I got an email today from Writing.com informing me that my poem “Northland Religion” had received a comment.  I had completely forgotten that Writing.com existed, that I had a profile, and the existence of the three items I had posted to that profile.  I recognized the tiny, six line poem when I read it:

Make it ten-thousand and one / for that little lake of tears / that baptized me / with reflections of the forest / and of the sun / and of the cloudless dome.

Simple, shabby, tangled in the language of my struggle to deal with loss of faith, and utterly forgotten, this poem had still reached someone who “really liked” it, a fellow Minnesotan who thanked me for its creation.

Although I’ve never completely given up on poetry, I know very well by now that creative fiction isn’t my realm.  Sometimes I feel like I’m betraying my old dreams; I was going to be a novelist and change the world with my ideas and my sparkling prose.  Sometimes it feels like settling to devote myself to the study of other people’s genius–“those that can’t do, teach” and all.  Yet I lack not only the aptitude but the patience and interest for writing prose, and I am passionate about academic English.  And now I find, when the ghost of ambition rattles her chains, that I can quiet her with silvers of approbation like today’s unexpected comment and go on, quite happily, in the less glorious path I am pleased to have chosen.

The Glop Within

It’s been so long since I’ve considered myself a writer of non-academic prose that I’m almost afraid to try again. Reading through the self-indulgent shit I’ve produced over the past seven years is embarrassing. Oh, the stuff I wrote at thirteen was forgivable–what average young writer doesn’t rip off the style and some of the plot of her favorite authors and come up with lame fantasy worlds peopled with undeveloped stereotypes? But thinking back to the self-indulgent trash I wrote as a senior in high school and even as a freshman in college is cringe-inducing. Looking at what I’ve produced, I’m tempted to think that I should have stopped writing at the same time I stopped braiding friendship bracelets to sell on the street-corner, and for the same reason: they were trash, and nobody in his right mind would want them. Now, after I’ve been keeping fiction inside for a couple of years, there’s no telling what will happen if I try again. It is quite possible that it has congealed into a stinking mass of unusable glop, and that attempting to write now would be nothing but an exercise in humility and failure. Of course, it is always possible that it could be fermented into a delicious and heady wine…maybe. Or not. I’d rather not let fear of failure stop me from doing things, though. Even if stinking glop comes out, I think I’ll pop the cork and see what’s been brewing.