Another Reason I Love the Writer and Writer's Digest

When the Writer and Writer’s Digest arrive each month, I feel like a writer. A real writer, with magazines that address what I do, what I dream, what I struggle with. Those writers who write into the Letters to the Editors are my peers. They feel like friends, as do the writers of the articles. They advice me, encourage me, guide me on this journey.

It’s like the best of workshops or writing groups and I don’t even have to shave my legs or do up my hair. No, I can grab a lemonade or cold drink of water, slip out on my cool shady patio, put my feet up on the wrought iron rail and dive into writerliness.

I feel part of, not different from in the pages of those magazines. Often a writer doesn’t feel a part of. Writer’s (or is it just me?) get the feeling of being the watcher, the recorder, a reporter of life, not completely immersed into life. Just a tad, outside. Oh, the emotions are there (for myself, emotions seem intensified, deeper and they stay with me longer. My mother calls me too sensitive to life’s stimulus.) I tend to dissect life, search for reasons within others or myself. I’ve read of writers who do this dispassionately, as if observing, but I find I delve into things with my whole heart and mind, trying to puzzle out backstory, untangle motive and puzzle over whys.

I do this in secret, like another ‘document’ being written inside the computer screen of my mind.

Is it any wonder I sometimes feel torn, distracted, a bit crazy, or not all there. As I write this, it sounds cold or calculated, as if as something happens in my life, I simply see how I can use it for my writing. If that were the case, it might be easier. I’d be removed from heartache, depression, worry. That isn’t how it happens. I live it, feel it, go through it and the same time another part of my mind is recording it, as much as possible, with all the emotion involved. Then later, I relive it as I try to figure out all the spaces: the scene, the details, the emotions, where the emotions came from, the backstory, the whys.

It has been said, writers live twice. And in the pages of these magazines, I get support for both lives. I get company for that journey that chose me. See, I don’t think I did the choosing. It seems it was there, always. I can’t remember when I didn’t approach life just that way. As a watcher, a recorder, a reporter of life. It’s just the way I was made. And that is that voice I hear, sometimes late at night, asking, why am I not more successful.

For me, those magazines are a huge thing as I juggle time between an elderly parent, grandchildren, husband, household and my dreams. All those wonderful but trying blessings sometimes clash with the dreams. But support is just a page away.

I’ve clung to these two subscriptions (even when money was wolf-at-the-door tight) since my father introduced me to them over forty years ago. Much has changed over those passing years—in my life, in publishing, in the world. But the Writer and Writer’s Digest has been there and kept the dream alive.

Check them out.