“Why Write?” by Sherie Posesorski

What started me writing was the white and yellow ballpoint pen I earned for my penmanship in grade three.

It seemed like I’d never earn a pen. The sight of all those pens clutched in the hands of my classmates filled me with jealousy, and shame. The way it was going – melodrama baked into my DNA, if not good penmanship--I would be the only student left in my class writing with a big, fat, dull red pencil.

My trips to the pencil sharpener at the front of the classroom felt like a perp walk.

It didn’t help my left-handed scrawl that I was seated at a right-handed desk since every single desk and every single classmate was right-handed. I had to squirm into a twisted, hunched position to be able to reach the desktop.

It also didn’t help that it wasn’t so easy to copy the teacher’s cursive lettering on the blackboard when all I saw, even when squinting hard, were white chalky blurs.

All that squirming, all those desk thumps as I repositioned myself and especially all that squinting made my teacher realize that not only was my left-handedness the source of my terrible cursive writing, but also my eyesight. She told my parents that I needed to get my eyes examined. That finally led to the ownership of the blessed pen, and the cursed black cat’s eye glasses.

So, there I was, pen in hand, glasses on nose, but what to write?

I offered to write down my mother’s shopping list. I don’t need a list, my memory is good, my mother replied. I knew that. Along with remembering everything that had happened to her, which was an awful lot, she never forgot anything I did – good or bad.

Still, I was a relentless nudge. To shut me up, she gave in, reciting the grocery list quickly, too quickly for me to write it with the perfect cursive penmanship that was the only point of earning a pen. I kept telling her to slow down, and kept ripping the pages out of the lined letter tablet until she grabbed the pen and the tablet out of my hands, telling me this was a big waste of time and paper.

You say you want to write, she said. Then why don’t you write in the five-year diary you got as a birthday present? It’s been sitting on your dresser collecting dust since your birthday.

My best friend loved writing in her one-year diary. She loved it so much that one page was never enough space for one day so her one-year diary really was a couple of months' diary.

I, however, struggled to fill up the few lines provided for each day in my five-year diary. What was the point of writing what I did when I did the same thing every day? I went to school. I went to the variety store after school to buy a five-cent bag of Hostess potato chips and two-cent chunk of Neilson Jersey Milk chocolate. I jumped yogi and Double Dutch with friends. I watched TV. I read. I did my homework. I slept. I got up and did the same thing the next day.

Who wanted to continually write that for the next five years? And worse, who would want to read it? Not even me. Plus, what good things happened to me. I could remember them in such detail that my parents, as good listeners as they tried to be, often appeared dazed by the time my story ended. And the bad things, well, I wanted to forget them, not have to relive them by rereading them in my diary.

Besides, diary writing was like talking to yourself. If writing was a conversation between writer and reader, as my teacher said, why write if nobody but me reads what I wrote. If I did that, I’d be just like the lady who lived on my street. She was usually so busy talking to herself that even when I said, hello, how are you today, she wouldn’t stop talking to herself to answer me.

When I saw postcards of Toronto while shopping with my mother, I asked her if we could go on a trip just so I could write on postcards wherever they took me back to my friends. My mother replied we weren’t going on trips just so I could write on postcards. When we did travel to Niagara Falls and Muskoka, I bought enough postcards to write, as my father joked, to every person I hardly knew.

I was so excited when the teacher announced we had to write a book report on our favorite book. My favorite wasn’t one book. It was a series about the Moffat family written by Eleanor Estes.

As I read my report in front of the class, I could hear whispering, then some boy said, loud enough for me and everybody else to hear, “Bet ya this is longer than the books!” I was crushed and could barely see the words on the page even with my glasses and my pretty good cursive writing. I hurried through the rest, skipping sentences and missing words just to get it over with.

There had to be some writing I could do that people would like to read. On the afternoon Buffalo TV show for children hosted by Commander Tom, he was always asking kids to write to him. Now that I had my own Shaeffer cartridge pen and letter pad (my parents had bought them to cheer me up after I sobbed out the saga of my book report fiasco), I did. A few weeks later, I received an autographed photo of Commander Tom and a short note.

Then and there, I decided to write to every TV and movie star I liked. I received my first writing and editing lesson from my mother who told me to keep my tendency to tell bobe mayses (Yiddish for a grandmother’s meandering tale) to a short, sweet minimum. No bobe mayse stories as long as a grandfather’s beard, as stale as day-old bread and as mixed up and confusing as a lost driver going in circles. In other words – my book report.

I got the addresses from the Photoplay and Silver Screen magazines my mother read.

I wrote Flipper the dolphin and that lonesome German Shepherd, The Littlest Hobo. Since the animals in some books, like Peter Rabbit, Mr. Toad and The Cat in the Hat, talked, I presumed that any animal smart enough to have his or her own TV show would naturally be smart enough to understand my letter when it was read out loud to them by their trainers.

I couldn’t stop staring at the picture I received of Flipper standing on his tail on the dock and of The Littlest Hobo beside a railroad track. There were a lot of human stars to write too. Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke from Mary Poppins. Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched.

The Littlest Hobo and his stunt dogs

I sat so close to the TV set when the shows I loved were on, that my mother said that it looked like I was getting ready to move in.

When the shows I came on, I wrote detailed notes about what was good about the star and the show so that my complimentary comments would prove how devoted a fan I was and therefore deserved an autographed picture.

How good my letter had been was determined by the spit test. If the signature was personally signed by the star, the ink would blur when I carefully tapped my spit covered little finger on the tip of the signature. Still, the majority of the signatures were stamped on and accompanied by form letters.

If stars could write form letters, then so could I. My form letters increased the volume of pictures I received, but decreased the fun and challenge of writing a personalized letter. It was no longer like a conversation with a person, but rather like speaking to the neighbour’s parrot Myron who replied “Oy vey! (Yiddish for woe is me) to everything you said, even when it was a good thing that happened, not a bad thing.

I gave up the form letters, and instead when I left for camp promised to write to my parents daily so they wouldn’t forget me and what I sounded like. What I sounded like after a few days of camp, however, was a prisoner, beseeching the members of the parole board, for an early release.

I promised to make my bed, hang up the laundry, dry the dishes – that I was a reformed slob. And that my counsellor had told me I would develop high cholesterol, which I had never heard of before, from eating the only food I liked at camp – hard boiled eggs slathered with peanut butter. It worked. My parents took me home early.

The next summer it was them on a vacation in Europe. I became a letter stalker. One of those crinkly blue airmail letters was waiting for them in every European and Middle East destination with some guilt trip plea, like “Can you please phone me from Tel Aviv? It’s only twelve dollars for three minutes after six o’clock. After all, I'm worth it!”

On their return with the stack of airmail letters, my mother came with a solution for letter writing mania. A pen pal. I was excited, but nervous too. All my letters to stars were about them. My letters to my parents were about me unfiltered – the nudge, the hypochondriac, the worrier – whom they loved even when driving them crazy. 

But what if I wrote about myself and my pen pal didn’t like me? Or thought my letters were as boring as snoring?

Through an exchange program at school, I was linked with a girl named Jeannie in Columbus, Ohio. To my delight, my stories like the one about how in home economics class, I had sewn a shift with one armpit hole large enough a leg and another doll size small, amused her. Now I got through horrible things at school, not by forgetting them, but by thinking what a good story they would make to write to Jeannie. 

I learned the invaluable lesson of writing. Everything was copy, as Nora Ephron memorably wrote. Copy flavoured by bobe mayse.

And that’s how I began to write.

***

Sherie Posesorski is a longtime freelance writer and editor living in Toronto. She is the author of Escape Plans, a children's novel (Coteau Books), and two YA novels, Shadowboxing (Coteau Books) and Old Photographs (Second Story Press).

Her book reviews have been published in various newspapers including The New York Times Book Review, The Globe & Mail, Vancouver Sun, Ottawa Citizen, National Post and The Toronto Star, and her personal essays in The Toronto Star and  Canadian Jewish News.

She holds a MA in English Literature from York University and a MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University. She still writes all her first drafts in pen – Bic Cristal pens – though her cursive writing these days likely would not have led to her being awarded a pen.  

Read more about Sherie’s books here.

See Brian Henry’s upcoming weekly writing classes, afternoon workshops, and wonderful writing retreats here.