The 1970s did me in. All my troubles began with the seventies and their strobe lights and burned draft cards and 99 cents a gallon gasoline and the relentless Viet Cong who didn’t know they were defeated but just kept coming and coming, garbed in twigs and mud, too stupid and fearless to know they couldn’t win a war against the Americans, but smart enough to know they couldn’t lose it either.
Every place I looked there was civil disobedience and body parts flying helter-skelter on the six o’clock news and remnants of Woodstock and drugs and women screaming about equal rights. I’m 77 years old now and like many Baby Boomers, I drifted through life much as a grasshopper jumps from one blade of grass to another looking for something it can’t find because it doesn’t know what it’s looking for. I was a secretary, a stay-at-home mom, a substitute school teacher. At 53 I enrolled in a two-week poetry workshop at Northern MI Univ. That workshop awakened the writer I always felt was in me.
I decided to earn my M.A. in English Comp and when the fall semester began, I drove to Marquette twice a week and attended classes. With winter fast approaching, I knew I had two choices. My courses were not offered online so I could either take the spring semester off or quit my job as an English instructor at Bay Mills Community College, move to graduate housing, and get my degree. My 18-year-old daughter asked what I wanted to do. I told her if she could manage on her own with the help of my mother, I’d be off like a shot. She told me to go for it.
The six months I lived on campus were some of the most rewarding of my life. Free from everything except class work, I concentrated on writing short stories and poems. I wrote every day and to my amazement, my professors loved my work. My master’s prospectus was accepted without requiring revisions. Creatively, I was on my way. I graduated the fall of 2001 and began teaching English Composition at Lake Superior State University.
Unfortunately, that career choice was a major mistake. I was too cynical and lacked the necessary patience to teach students who were either too arrogant or too bored to pay attention. My philosophy went something like this. If my students hadn’t learned how to write a composition paper in all their previous years of schooling, there was little chance I was going to teach them anything. After three excruciating years, I called it quits. Not knowing what to do with my time I started writing a blog, but I had no followers. However, I did have some good pieces and on a whim I took them to the editor of our local newspaper. After glancing them over, he said he would run my column twice a week. When I left his office, I had no idea what I was going to write. My interest was short stories.
But at the ripe old age of 66 I started writing “Common Sense at 60” and realized I saw a story everywhere. I wrote a general interest 450-word column twice a week for 30 months. I received no payment for my efforts, but those columns morphed into a book I published in 2016. I gave readings whenever an organization or library requested. When I read, I did more than just stand and parrot what was on the page. I performed. Folks often came up to me when I finished and said if my writing didn’t work out, I could always go on the road as a comic.
For years I wrote almost every day and submitted my stuff on the off chance someone might publish it. Bud Sargent, editor of the Marquette Mining Journal, saw merit in my work and invited me to submit a weekly column that appeared regularly in the Thursday edition of the Mining Journal. As usual, I received no payment so after a couple years I knew it was time to move on. I was tired of giving my creative work away as if it were nothing more than a chewed piece of gum. Victor Volkman of Modern History Press liked my stuff and expressed interest in publishing my stories in the U.P. Reader. That morphed into a publishing contract for five books. He was my lifeline.
So maybe the 1970s did me a favor. If I hadn’t lived through some of the most tumultuous times in our history, I might have retired to my rocking chair, never having written more than a grocery list. As it is, I turned my back on the safety of a secure life and struck out on my own.
Am I glad I did? Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Some years were hard, but there’s always a price to pay for freedom. Rejecting stability isn’t for everyone, but it worked for me. And that, with many unspoken twists and turns, is the story of how I became a writer.
