Red Room Where the Writers Are

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Lately I’ve been thinking of roads. Maybe the road metaphor came to me when the main street in my town was being repaved, or maybe it’s because I have been thinking of the Robert Burns poem about the road less traveled.

            I went to a Mills friend’s apartment yesterday to say good-bye to her. She’s moving today with her girlfriend to get her doctorate at Columbia. We caught up, I packed a box of books, hugged goodbye, and went and got lunch. However, I felt so sad. I went home and the sadness was increased when I found out Randy Pausch died after reading Kirsty Kiernan’s latest blog.  Suddenly I was so blue I couldn’t stand it.

            If you didn’t know who Randy Pausch was, just go later to my media section and watch his last lecture. He was a professor at Carnegie Mellon who was set to deliver “the last lecture” which is done every September. However, it became bittersweet when he found out he had terminal cancer the month before. He touched on his mortality in his lecture, and told people to live their best lives. Of course, Oprah was over this so quickly it made Pausch’s teddy bears jump. It became a book, and Diane Sawyer interviewed him. I knew he was going to die soon, but I was still shocked by his death.

            Randy Pausch was big on childhood dreams, making them come true. He managed to be in a upcoming Star Trek movie (a dream of his was to be Captain Kirk) and to play with a football team (he got to practice with one) It got me to thinking about dreams, and roads taken and not taken.

            I guess it’s no surprise that I wanted to be a writer since I was ten. Although I haven’t walked in a bookstore yet and seen a book of mine on the shelves, it will happen, I’m telling you now. It might be when I’m eighty something like with Helen Hoover Santemeyer or Virginia Hamilton Adair, but it will happen.

            However, unlike many of my classmates at Mills, I didn’t chose an academic life after college. That last year, it was all about graduate school. Graduate school, graduate school, graduate school! Yes, good old grad school, to get more letters behind your name. I decided to apply to a college that had a low residency program, so then I could do most of my coursework online and by snail-mail. I knew getting an MFA was the smart thing to do. There was a joke with the English majors that our degree in English would buy us a bag of chips at the tea shop, and not much else.  However, something kept on holding me back doing the applications, doing the whole damned thing.

            At first, I thought it was because I was coming off a difficult semester, and I moved as well. However, I did send the application in, three days before it was due. I waited and waited, and a week before I was going to graduate, I got the thin envelope.

            I was bummed for two hours. I think I got over it quickly when I reread the letter and they suggested I should take more creative writing classes. Since I have been taking classes since I was seventeen (I was thirty-three at the time of the rejection) I realized that hey, maybe they weren’t the right college for me. My friends were more bummed about it than I was. I think I was relieved, in a weird way. Although I didn’t know what I was going to do next, I was relieved.

             I couldn’t explain my relief until two years later when I read a book by Martha Beck called Steering by Starlight.  Dr. Beck describes in the book that there are times in your life when you make choices or you have to decide which road to take, you will feel feel a shackles on feeling, or a shackles off feeling. The shackles on feeling is when you feel like someone is putting shackles on your wrists and dragging you down a road you don’t really want to go on. The shackles off feeling is that there are no shackles on you, you’re free as a bird, ease on down that road, sister!
            Now this isn’t to badmouth MFA’s or say I’ll never get one. Never say never, and I’m researching to see if I can get a master’s in education. I would love to meet the writers I read and learn how they do it, how they master their craft, their feedback on their work. However, although I value my BA from Mills and thank God every day I had the opportunity to go there, I know I’m not meant for the academic life. I don’t know yet if I can go to a community college and teach several English composition classes, then go to another community college and do the same thing, and get little money for it. Many of my friends can do this and I admire them for it. However, whenever I think of it for myself, I got shackles on feeling. I know I want to teach, but I see myself teaching in the community, teaching on the internet, maybe even workshops in my house.

            In addition, as much as I loved the English classes at Mills and they would excite me, I remember how intimidated I felt in them. For example, one time in an Advanced Fiction class we had to go around and say what we read that summer. Here are some examples:

            Woman One: I re-read Crime and Punishment. Oh, it was so amazing!

            Woman Two: I managed to read Longfellow’s poetry. That man is incredible.

            Me: I read all of the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace.

            Now this isn’t to make fun of my classmates or even me. By now, the readers of this blog know I have a varied taste in reading.  Hey, we’re all different, that is what makes us cool. There were times, however, I felt like a lightweight. Of course, it’s not true, but until I stop feeling like that is when I’m ready to go back.

            The road I chose isn’t perfect-but it’s mine. I can’t compare myself to anybody else with the roads they take, because it’s their own road. What I can do is just keep plugging along, going down the road, finding my own version of Emerald City. We’re all looking for that, I believe, to see that green image at the end of the road, and to be like Dorothy, to skip like crazy to get there. Not all roads are alike. My road was different. Randy Pausch’s road was different. The goal is always the same-to find the green, find your light. I know I’ll get where I’m going.