I happened onto this theme for my Advanced Writing Workshop at The Clearing two years ago, returned to it again with my classes this year, and find it both so compelling and inexhaustible (it’s been my life since the age of seventeen-first, private; then public; increasingly more contemplative through the years) that as I begin this bloody business of blogging, I sense The Writing Life will soon develop into a major theme that will hopefully appeal to writers and non-writers alike. The difference?

Non-writers live it and mostly remember to tell it.

Writers live it, examine it (re-live it), record it (preserve the memory) and with luck (and art) sometimes transform their own lives and the lives of others as well.

Which is the only reason for doing it. Consider it a calling. The territory within, not everyone wishes to explore.

The satisfying, solid-slick click of these keys on the keyboard now, the words so brightly illuminated on this new, flat screen…the silence of the green woods all around me. Before this there were at least four other computers of various sizes and outmoded technical capabilities. Never an electronic typer, though. Never an electric. (The loud hum drove me crazy in this rural setting. I had grown so accustomed to hearing nothing). Outside the back window of the coop now, my homage to the manual typewriter: six or seven of them, all makes and models, each harboring a part of this writer’s history. My old, broken, unfixable, passe’ manuals (so hard to part with), lined up in a row on a long, fallen tree trunk, marking only weather, time, and disintegration now. Buried words.

Before this (here and now) there was the city, Chicago. The neighborhood (Cicero/Berwyn) A basement. An old Underwood, a portable Smith-Corona typewriter. And a small, black leather, three ringed notebook. And a pen.

Black ink. Always. Black ink. The blacker the better. Permanent Black.

There is a whole history of pens (Sheaffer)-city and country. From fountain (Skrip ink bottles), to ballpoint, to two favorites (still): The felt tip Flair (medium 1.1mm) and the white plastic Paper Mate (Ultra Fine Flair), almost extinct.

And once upon a time there was wooden kitchen table in the old neighborhood. A legal pad. And a Dixon Ticonderoga #2 Soft yellow pencil.

That’s where and how it began. The Writing Life. Before blogging.
Not a bad place to begin. Still.