Finding My Way to the Page: A Guest Post by Ellen Birkett Morris
I’m on maternity leave! During this time, a few of my favorite authors offered to step up and write guest posts so that this blog would remain active while I adjust to my new role as a mother. I may also be a bit slower to respond. Thanks for understanding and for being so supportive of me, my family, and my blog. Want to donate a few dollars to keep this blog running or perhaps contribute to my diaper fund? You can do so on Venmo or Paypal.
Finding My Way to the Page: A Guest Post by Ellen Birkett Morris
When I was a kid, my father, a writer, sat at our kitchen table pounding on a typewriter as I came and went getting snacks for my afternoon with Yogi Bear, Bewitched and Gomer Pyle.
He stayed there as I went outside to hang off the tree in the front yard with my friend Sheila. If you had drove past, you’d have seen two chubby girls facing each other as they hung from the branches laughing, a custom we stopped when we took down the tree branch with our weight. Surely whatever Dad was doing lacked the drama of our felled branch.
He didn’t just write. My dad read to my sisters and I. “Jabberwocky,” a Lewis Carroll poem, managed to be scary while using playful words like gyre, gimble and wabe. The words tumbled over each other like the sea otters playing in a pool at the zoo. Tucked safely into bed, I felt the creeping danger of the beast approaching. The biting jaws and catching claws. The “frumious” animal that I could only presume was both furious and frightful. As my father read the story, my mind absorbed the rhythms.
Not much later, he also read us Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” a story about a family murdered on the roadside. I was scared but also intrigued by the deep characterization and inherent drama.
I began writing stories of my own about a shaft shifting boss who would take the form of anyone from a body builder to nerdy scientist. My work included figures of my childish imagination like a talking alligator and a woman made of popcorn. Writing was power and at age nine the power to control anything held lots of appeal for me.
Later writing was a way to process my experiences and emotions, slantwise. I wrote a poem. “Sixteen,” that featured a young girl horseback riding that compared the contentment of eating cake to the thrill of desire for a football player.
I came to write a collection of short stories, Lost Girls that embodied my own struggles with loneliness, sexual harassment, aging, complicity and love. I left each story with more clarity about who I am and what I’ve experienced.
When my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer and I with rheumatoid arthritis, I learned how to escape through my writing. The work was hard. I compared it to chipping away at a mountain with nail scissors. But writing the story of a mother whose son had past life memories and the soldier whose memories the child had kept me absorbed. I was with the mother in her quest for answers as she confronted marital difficulties. I was with the soldier on the ground in Vietnam during an ambush. I got mercifully lost in the writing and knew it was waiting for me, a portal to escape aching bones and a mother whose cough got deeper and more persistent.
Finally, my work became a pleasure. With my grief integrated into my daily life and my rheumatoid mostly managed, I began writing a dream scenario, the story of a young female astronomer on her way to a fantastic discovery. As I wrote new scenarios found their way to me. My character has a mother she loves who is terminally ill. She has a romance, oh wait, she has two. The words flowed and I woke each day to immerse myself in Hawaiian culture and astronomy and romance. I got lost in the work in the best kind of way, like my father at his typewriter had, oblivious to my multiple trips into the kitchen. I inhabit my made world, living out the dream on the page. This is why I write.
Finding My Way to the Page: A Guest Post by Ellen Birkett Morris
