Writing...

I am a writer

The first time I remember writing I was 20. The experience of needing to put whatever was in my head down on paper. It was a typewriter then. At my makeshift desk in San Francisco. The one that I shared with my sister, Lynnie on Russian Hill. It was a great apartment, more like a cottage, next street over from the windy part of Lombard Street. And off in the distance you could see the Bay. And it had a little patio out front and off that was a park. Tons of trees and bushes and flowers and steps going down (or up.) And that’s where I lived my last 2 years at Berkeley. Before I left to marry Miller. But this night that I wrote I had had a lot to drink and was very sad. Perhaps suicidal sad. I had no idea who I was and thought I would never have a real boyfriend or husband. I may have even graduated (so I was 22) from Berkeley but was still just living in San Francisco not knowing what the hell to do with my life. And I wrote something like why didn’t I just commit suicide and make room for someone else to live who had more to give back. At least more to offer. I can still feel what it felt like to write that and to be sitting at the typewriter crying. Aching. And all liquered up. Panicked about my hair…would it go frizzy? Why didn’t I look more waspy? (That’s easy, because I am Jewish.) But I look pretty. Beautiful even. At least I did back then. So why was I so obsessed with looking pretty? And looking like something I wasn’t? I just couldn’t find my own beauty. Actually I did in spurts. From time to time I was natural. And happy with how I looked and even who I was.
I have all these thoughts about Janice Shelton (I think that was her name….) I hitch hiked home from Lake Tahoe with her when I left Miller that time before we got engaged. Anyway I was real with Janice. Maybe because she was real.
Anyway for some reason I could actually write that night. Something other than term papers and the other things we wrote in college. Though I don’t remember writing all that much at Berkeley.
Next thing I remember writing was when I was married and on my out of the marriage. I was so pissed off that I had been having lunches with the news director at the all news radio station in Los Angeles about a zillion times and he must have been attracted to me and liked the attention but had no intention of hiring me. He did teach me tons though. He had me write copy and I learned writing samples for him. He even had me in the studio recording a demo tape but he never did hire me. I wanted to be an anchor which was absurd because I only had a year of experience as a reporter in Bakersfield when we moved to Los Angeles. The important thing is that I wrote about it. The not getting hired and eating all those meatball sandwiches with a man who pretty much repulsed me but who was in a position to hire me when I desperately wanted a job. That was my first short story. Borrowed heavily from real life. More than heavily. Lets be honest here.
(2nd blog post today) After the meeting this morning Eileen told me she was amazed that I could say with such assurance that I am a writer. So that had me going back. Almost always when I think of writing the first piece that I really let go and just wrote was Bush Jumping Bimbos. I can’t find it anywhere but it was a sort of hybrid…short story, personal essay. Somewhere in between. The first pure short story I wrote (Oh The Hunting Party was also a hybrid) but then came The Snow Goose which was closer to short story than personal essay. Same thing with Fit. You know come to think of it all of my stories are hybrids. With some of me and some fiction. Really The Snow Goose and In a Tanning Parlor were closer to short stories. Missing Her was almost all personal essay. Four Maybe Five Cars Back was all personal essay.
So I write more of a personal essay, short story so what should I call what I write? Progs? (Blogs with prose fiction in them) Perlogs Prose essay logs. I try to pass them off as short stories. And I get into them. Is that how my tv news stories were too? I guess I cannot completely invent something. I am writing about me. At first I wrote about me trying to figure out who I was. Now I write looking back at who I am and where it came from.