Today I wandered unexpectedly into my past. I was attempting to tidy my writing office, a room which sits on the second floor of our house and looks out to the Cascades Three Sisters Mountains.
I set out to rearrange boxes of research articles, old manuscripts and short stories I’d written twenty years ago. Not wanting to lose them, I placed the short stories close to my desk in a file box marked possibilities. Who knows? There could be the essence of a new novel within those pages.
However, in the midst of my ‘so-called’ clean out, I discovered a file of educator magazines – including, lo and behold, one in which I’d published an article in 1997.
I’d forgotten about my first foray into writing for publication, and I sat down and to read through my article once again. It was titled Tough Times, Resilient People. I’d written this piece inspired by a greeting card that had sat on my desk for a few months…the words on the card spoke to me at the time I bought it, and from then on, I’d kept it within my gaze.
At that time, the phrases on the card resonated for me for all the vagaries of life. Now I realize they speak through me as a writer, and in this way, through my characters.
The words said:
“I get up,
I walk,
I fall down,
meanwhile I keep dancing.”
Twenty-eight years ago, I wrote the words below in my article:
“Gain the courage to reveal hopes and take on possibilities even in the midst of unrest; regain and nurture a sense of curiosity-hold and nourish your ever-present capacities for resilience and creativity.”
When I wrote these words I was an elementary school principal, into my thirty-sixth year as an educator. And now, in my life as a writer, I call upon those same capacities within myself and my characters: Martha and Anna in Out of Place, Casey in Those We Left Behind, Bridget and Sophie in the Shelter of Each Other, and soon, Emmaline and Kate Robinson in Tell It True.
Remarkably, each of these women represent the ideas and the values I wrote about in 1997. Could it be that I’m still writing about human qualities that give us a way forward?
Just as these women in my novels find their way through the complexities of the unknown, through chaos that can bring despair and ultimately resolution, I find my way as a woman enlivened and a writer inspired.
Writing gives me a kind of saving grace – the link between resilience and the creative spirit.