The Writer and Writer's Digest

I started writing stories in the back seat of an old ’54 gray and white Chevy. Bored more than anything. We didn’t have Game boys, I-pods or cell phones. Heck, I didn’t even have the luxury of paper and pen at first. Only a stub pencil and a piece of cardboard my father tore from a box for me. I can still remember the feel of the rough seatback as I slid down into the seat. The world went away as I wrote.


The story was an adventure about a girl and her horse. Back then it always was. I was completely horse crazy. A dreamer of a girl, with her nose in a book or notebook. A friend of my mom called, fey. I was always pretending, always somewhere else in my mind. Making up adventures, dialogue, characters.


In high school years later, my desire to write became a tentative career move. (Not completely serious because back then, the real goal for girls back then was still to get married. The 60s free love hadn’t quite caught up to my small town.) My father introduced me to The Writer and Writer’s Digest. Once a month I would find a copy of both on my bed. Quiet encouragement. Nudges.


I read them cover to cover. Took every writing class my high school offered, wrote reams of angst-riddled poetry and high school news copy. Then, like every other girl in my class I went looking for my guy.


That was over forty years ago, my father’s been gone most of them. I still read every issue of both magazines, cover to cover. That steady, quiet encouragement has whispered to me all these years. My father, a floundering writer himself, understood my lapses, my day-dreaming, my imagination. My sometimes observing life instead of living it, of not always being completely present. He, too, knew what it was like to try to imprint something that popped into his mind so he didn’t lose it. He understood my eaves-dropping on conversation, my constant questions, my wondering, my compulsion to find out why, how, when, where and who.


He must have known the same desperation when he found himself without pen or paper, the gut-punch of rejection, the quiet desperate theft of that moment in a busy life to write, but I’m not sure he had the quiet encouragement I got from him. That I still get, every month as the magazines come to my mailbox. A little encouragement from heaven.


We all need some. Here’s a nydge for all of you.



Write—Save yourself. Write anyway!