Digging up my writing life

at Two Writing Teachers!

I've spent most of the day today pouring through old pieces of my own writing, from kindergarten journals, drawings, and "books", to recent blog entries.  Tomorrow, my journey with the Columbus Area Writing Project begins, and we've been assigned an "archeological dig" of ourselves as writers.  Each participant gets to set up a small display of "artifacts" from our writing lives, with an accompanying narrative to weave them together. 

Here's the introduction to my display:

If you looked around any house I’ve lived in, you’d notice two things: notepads and books.  Surprised at my early literacy skills, my kindergarten teacher asked my mom how many books were in our house.  My mom got tired and stopped counting at 1,100.  Is it any surprise I tried to fill every free minute with reading? When I got a little older, I started stashing books everywhere: on the couch, in the bathroom, under my bed.  If there wasn’t a book within reach, I’d read anything I could get my hands on, from the upside-down newspaper across the table to the ingredients on my cereal box.  (One morning at breakfast I bewildered my parents by asking what guar gum was.  It had to be important, because it was listed in the ingredients of almost everything!)  Late at night, my thoughts always kept me awake far after my parents thought I was asleep, and those nebulous dark hours would always find me curled up with a flashlight, soothing my racing mind with a book or a notepad.  While I’m usually so exhausted now that I have no trouble falling asleep, I still have to keep notepads by the bed for those delicious moments when the perfect words jolt me awake in the middle of the night.

When I told my mom I needed some samples of my old writing, she started dragging out boxes. “I hope the Writing Project rented a semi truck for you to drive to Kenyon College,” she joked.  From messy poems drafted on tiny midnight notepads to wallpaper-covered books “published” at my elementary school publishing shop, my early writing life took hours to explore.  Even through times when my memory told me I had “lost” my writing, I discovered that casual journals, carefully crafted essays, and heartfelt letters continued to sustain my writerly self.  While my writing may not leave such an obvious physical trail anymore, it now flourishes through clicking keys and tapping fingers. (Of course, that doesn’t mean there aren’t still notepads scattered around the house, waiting to catch those sparkling ideas that arrive in the middle of dinner preparations, TV shows, showers, and sleep!)  No longer confined to wrinkled pages hiding under my bed or cautious sharing to a few select friends or teachers, my words now fly courageously across the country and around the world just seconds after I push “publish”!  

To complete the display, I filled five binders with a variety of "artifacts" of my writing life, organized into five areas:

• Writing to Remember and Reflect
• Writing to Tell Stories
• Writing to Play with Words
• Writing to Explain and Discover
• Writing to Communicate and Connect

I had so much fun "digging" through my writing life, and I can't wait to interact with the other writers' displays and read their comments about mine!