Digging up bones

These bones are metaphorical – a pile of manuscripts from decades ago, when I was a younger writer, unpublished for the most part. My sister found them when she was cleaning out her office – stories and scraps of stories from our first writing group, which started around the kitchen table of the house I lived in with my first husband.

Here is a list of what I found:

· A complete story, written from the POV of a young single father, centering on a pumpkin at Halloween (later published in Redbook).

· Several drafts of a story using scenes from a job I had at the time with Cleveland State’s Returning Women Program (for women going back to school later in life, run by the amazing Mareyjoyce Green, who gave me a job although I had no experience). I think this might have been published in Whiskey Island, CSU’s literary magazine.

· Notes for something that maybe was going to be a novel about an older woman who disastrously changes her life. Quote from the notes, about introducing a younger character: “I don’t think I can write a story entirely about people much older than myself” — which made me laugh. I got the main character’s name from a gravestone: Rita Starnes.

· A mostly finished story, untitled, about a young man remembering his father, which interestingly uses incidents and characteristics for the father’s character borrowed from my own father, but also from my first and second fathers-in-law.

· A short short story (written before flash was a thing, so it seemed unsuccessful to me) fictionalizing an incident when I lived in Yuma and an escaped prisoner (slightly known to me) came to my house to use the phone.

· A short one-act play that takes place on a city bus.

· The last six pages of a twelve-page story that seems to have to do with getting a haircut and infidelity.

· Another short short about a woman who does not buy a glamorous pair of shoes.

· A poem (yes, I used to write poems, until I ceded this genre to my much more talented poet-sister), titled “Spicy Stuff” – I’ll spare you by not quoting.

· Another short short – a first person narrator musing on how he or she is turning transparent. This has a handwritten note on the last page from someone in that first writing group – shout out to Michael Lawless, wherever he might be – in which he very kindly compliments the tone and imagery.

It was strange reading these, and the very look of them is strange. They were typed on a typewriter (except for one that is handwritten) – I didn’t then use a computer to compose. Some of them are mimeographed. One of them is printed on old-style computer paper, the pages still attached to each other.

I can recognize myself in the writing, although that self seems distant. I recognize the striving. In the notes for a novel, I recognize my work process, my obsessive listing, my habit of talking to myself about what I was writing or wanted to write. There are some good sentences and vivid images and some that are laughable or embarrassing. The dialogue is pretty good – that’s something that has always come easy to me. I especially liked the conversation between two old ladies on the bus in the one-act play.

I can see the strong influence of Anne Beattie in the endings of the finished stories – that sort of flat epiphany that depends on elements of setting or significant objects for emotional impact. Along with Anne Beattie, I can also feel the influence of the writer who introduced me to her – John Gerlach at CSU, one of my most important teachers.

I thought it might make me melancholy to read over these fragments rescued from the past and I put it off. They sat under a pile of papers on my coffee table all summer long. But it didn’t — I liked revisiting my younger writer-self. I respected her perseverance – how she kept trying to get at something, kept looking for different ways into a story.

Did she know that she’d still be writing all this time later? I can’t remember exactly what I thought about that. I think I wasn’t very interested in the future – the present was so compelling, so full of things, so frustrating and enchanting. But one thing was the same then as now: every day that I wrote something was a good day. I was always striving for that good day, and still am.