Why I write (and who I write for)

With deep gratitude to Peggy Shumaker, Daryl Farmer, Sarah Pape and Susan Sugai, and in memory of my MFA thesis advisor, Frank Soos. Post topic suggested by Dr. Christine Simko.

Warning: this is a very long post.

If you’d asked me why I write when I was 20, 30, 40, 50, or 60, you’d have gotten a slightly different answer every time. And now, at 66 years old, the answer has changed yet again. Maybe for the better.

I’ve always loved to write. When I was a little girl, I wrote and illustrated a little book about a girl named Willow who tames a wild horse. I wrote long letters to friends, I wrote poems, I kept a journal. When I was young, there was no why other than that it was fun. I was such an avid reader that I think all those words stuffed into my head needed an overflow valve.

Something changed in high school. I wrote a short story about a woman who creates a sort of sanctuary for her friends, a place called Gray Haven. Unexpectedly, it won a high school English writing contest. The concept that I might write something that others would read, and especially that would be evaluated and found worthy of reading, marked the start of a lifetime love-hate relationship with the craft, and a deep and abiding confusion about who I was writing for.

By my 20s, my goal was to be a famous writer. I wasn’t sure what that looked like, but I thought probably the New York Times bestseller list was involved. Which likely meant either fiction or some killer nonfiction reporting, since my as-yet-short life wasn’t worthy of memoir. Yet fiction threw me into a cold sweat, and I didn’t have the skills for top-shelf literary journalism. I was defeated before I even began, and I knew it.

In my mid-20s, having decided it was possible I might not become famous, I began looking for jobs related to the writing life. I took journalism classes at UAF and wrote several magazine articles that got published, but oddly enough, that didn’t qualify in my mind as any kind of success. (No, I don’t have a plausible explanation for that.) I also got into contract editing and resume-writing, both of them quite rewarding in their own right, even if not nearly as satisfying as being a famous writer.

In my 30s, I became passionately involved with skijoring (skiing behind a dog in harness). I said to Mari Høe-Raitto—our local expert on the sport—that we should write a book. Two hundred pages later, we tried unsuccessfully to find a Lower 48 publisher, but skijoring was a “niche” sport and no one believed we could sell more than a few hundred copies. Even a publisher based in Alaska was too skeptical to take a chance on us. My friend Lynn Orbison and I realized that she and I knew more about our audience and our market than anyone else, so we decided to publish it ourselves. Thus, OK Publishing was born. By the end of its fourth printing, the first edition of Skijor With Your Dog had sold some 20,000 copies. It’s now in its second edition, published by University of Alaska Press. 

Yet that still didn’t qualify as success in my mind. By now, I was pretty sure the NYT bestseller list wasn’t a legitimate yardstick, but I’d set a new bar for myself. I was working on a memoir about the death of my little sister, and I’d be successful when it got published. Nothing like setting oneself up for failure. Besides that, I didn’t really know who I was writing the book for. Mostly myself, hindsight tells me.

In my 40s, I got distracted by a good job, my very own house in the woods, 14 sled dogs, and a husband. The only writing I did was in my journals. It was clear that I needed help if I was going to finish that memoir, so in the fall of 2003 I decided to seriously think about the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I kept my job and went to school part-time (thank you, Susan), and graduated with an MFA in creative nonfiction in spring 2010. At age 54, dressed in a cap and gown, I walked across that stage with a grin so broad I don’t know why my face didn’t split open. I’d published two essays and one poem in literary journals, I’d turned my memoir into a master’s thesis, and I’d loved every single minute of all that hard work.

But if anything, now I really didn’t know who I was writing for, or why. Everyone on my committee agreed that my thesis was a very good thesis, but not ready to be a finished book. I’d seen so much excellent writing from classmates and professors that I felt like an imposter. What was I thinking?

A few years after graduating, I went into crisis about the whole thing. Was I even worthy to throw my writing out there? Was I wasting people’s time? And if my writing wasn’t worth sharing, wasn’t worth publishing, should I be wasting my own time? The self-doubt was eating me alive.

In desperation, I contacted Peggy Shumaker. The writers in Peggy’s wide circle of influence have our very own druid, our living, breathing guardian angel. If my memory is correct, she was not feeling well at the time, and I think we may have talked on the phone instead of in person because of it. I dumped all my insecurities into her lap—and have felt guilty about my imposition on her ever since. But she was gracious and generous. I don’t recall her exact words, but in effect, she asked me if I liked who I was when I wrote. That answer was an easy “yes.” I’m impulsive, quick to jump to conclusions, a careless speaker, unintentionally flippant at times. Writing slows me down, makes me more thoughtful. I tend to be more generous, more accepting, better able to see many sides to an issue. I like my writerly persona better than my regular day-to-day self.

There’s your answer, she said.

It didn’t fix everything, but it sure helped pull me back from the edge. I decided to keep writing, though I questioned whether any of it was worth the light of day.

In my late 50s, I came to the sudden and surprising realization that I was not immortal. In my early 60s, that evolved into the realization that I probably wasn’t going to climb any big mountains or have a storied job as executive director of a world-saving nonprofit or start a lifelong career as a famous author. Clearly, when it came to literary endeavors, I was just a hobbyist. I was taking courses in nonfiction with Daryl Farmer at the university (he and his classes were water in my desert), I was writing for myself, and I was sharing some stuff with friends because they were always supportive, but I was not a real writer. Except that I couldn’t give it up. I could consign my writing to journals, to class assignments, but the words wouldn’t go away

I started attending the creative writing workshop at the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival just for fun. In 2018, when I was 62, Sarah Pape, who was one of the instructors at the workshop, asked me if I’d be interested in working one-on-one with her to develop my writing. Oh-my-god yes, of course! I was filled with hope. She might help me tone down my “purple prose,” refine my stories, and maybe even find a publisher for the memoir I couldn’t quite give up on. Sarah suggested that the best strategy would be to pull out sections of the book and see if we could get them published individually as essays, so that it’d be easier to sell a publisher on the book itself.

Now I had a path forward that circumvented some of the self-doubt, the conviction that I was doomed to fail, and the idea that my writing was a waste of time. It was an insurmountable task to believe in myself, but I could choose a chapter from the book and make it into an essay.

With Sarah’s help, I made a bunch of progress on those essays. (Right now I have seven essay submissions out to various literary journals. I should also mention that I have nine rejections. And nothing accepted yet.)

Through it all, I was still in a bad place. Now, I was writing for literary journals, and success was defined as getting published by one of them. Which wasn’t happening. My ego was still battling for my soul, and winning.

After my oldest brother died in June 2021, I did a lot of thinking about my writing, my life, all the choices I’d made, all the seemingly wrong turns, all the wasted opportunities, all the thwarted dreams. Especially all the thwarted dreams. My brother had devoted his life to music and community, and in the end, had received recognition beyond anything he could have dreamed of. Other than a brief stint as a successful competitive sprint musher, I had devoted my life to nothing, and I had nothing to show for it. I felt lost, undone, my life meaningless. Worthless. Insignificant.

Of necessity, because I could not have lived in that dark place forever, something shifted in me. It happened slowly, gradually—a coming to terms with the notion that all I have is myself, all I am is myself. And a realization that I need to learn that my self is enough.

And with that shift, so shifted my perception of writing. What exactly is success, anyway? What matters, really? Why not accept that I write because I love to write? 

Except in that case, why send out what I’ve written? If it was only about loving to do it, I could be content to write in my journals. I wouldn’t feel the need to struggle over word choice, to write and rewrite a paragraph until it felt better, to fuss over endings (which I find so dang hard), to pare away all the over-telling I am awfully good at. But… when I work at those words and then share them, and someone gets it, or doesn’t get it but still enjoys it, or finds it matters enough to them to critique it and make suggestions for improvement, that’s a whole separate kind of joy. I don’t want to write just for myself. I want to write to give something to whoever might like it. Kind of like making oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

I still send pieces to literary journals. I still want to publish that book. There’s a thought in the back of my head that refuses to go away: someone out there might want to hear what I’ve written about my little sister, about love and death, about culpability and forgiveness. Someone might recognize theirownself in my story. Maybe—I hope this is not hubris—reading my story might make someone else’s story a little more bearable.

But being published is no longer my definition of success. Success for me, now, is learning to be content with who I am. Is learning the hard, hard lesson that who I am is enough.