Little questions like this are funny because I’m unsure how to answer them. If we mean as in this newsletter, then since June of 2022. But if we mean ever, then I think that would be a much more complicated story to tell, mostly because I’m not exactly sure of when.
Sometimes creativity shoots you down like a bird, white-hot pain cutting through skin and bones with no warning. Gravity clutches you with tireless hands even though you know more is expected of you. And while the blood, you think, will surely stop flowing eventually, it won’t, and the red ribbon ties you down to the place where you first hit the ground. At some point, you learn that you either give in or feel the ribbon choking you forever. You get a little sick of not being able to breathe after so many years of ignorance towards your tendencies — for me, it’s writing. It’s an all-or-nothing kind of burden.
I think I was writing before I knew how to take a pen to paper. Writing, after all, is a tangible form of everything that goes through your mind, much like any other creative thing. I have always been writing, ever since I saw the gnarled backs of early morning alligators and thought of the way they reminded me of the knuckles on my father’s hands. Or even as I’ve spent years writing near-drowning into a form of baptism. I’ve turned God into dirt roads, into people, into places that have long been overgrown by kudzu leaves and crabgrass. From the moment my five-year-old mind witnessed the deaths of friends gone too soon, sacrilegious religion, and the belly-up bodies of fish killed by stray motors — I was writing it all, going over it constantly in my mind, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. I read somewhere once that a novel is a long piece of writing that has something wrong with it, and I can’t help but think that that is just a lifetime. Writing since literacy, following a trail of something undeniably wrong but never pinpointing which bleeding wound is the culprit. Writing for the sake of tracking down the problem someday, if not today, if not ever. Running the red ribbon down to its fraying ends, and finding that in the end, it all comes back to you, as much as you hate to admit it. You want to blame these desires on something else but the smoking gun was held in your left hand all along, with a pen in the other.
So with that, there is no real way of saying when I truly started writing. My first publication, being a contributing writer to the 2021 Earth and Sky Anthology, was a small poem I now look back on with a bit of distaste. The curse of writing is constantly looking back and seeing what you could’ve done better. Since then, I’ve been published by small magazines and online collections, and have accumulated a decent amount of all of you, who graciously keep your names on the list of UVUC. I am not the best writer, or the most well-known (since quite often those two things do not correlate) and while I am trying to make a life out of this creativity it didn’t begin for the sake of money. Writing was, and thankfully still is, a pastime, an outlet, and a way of feeling through things I couldn’t find any better way of processing. I think one of the greatest blessings one can have (other than love, a warm home, and peace) is finding a way to live off of doing what one loves, and that is what I strive for.
How one approaches writing is different for everyone. A childhood surrounded by theological writings, Sunday School, and the backs of plastic packaging for fishing hooks and wire have coincidentally led me to turn religion into the scales of fish and lake waves on dark sand as boats churn past, where Easter became the red, white, and blue of fireworks over the Cathead Marina. Writing, at first, was prayers, or letters to loved ones with farms in thanks for the tomatoes and watermelon. Writing was the unwritten instructions from my father on how to throw a fly line, and the unspoken techniques of my mother as she cooked shrimp rice and oysters in the kitchen, learning quickly to watch carefully before making the mistakes myself. Writing was church signs and menus that read ‘One Meat, Two Sides’ and it was up to you to be local enough to know the options. It has different origins for everyone, and everything bleeds into writing, whether intentionally or unintentionally. It’s a navigation, an unsent letter, and all the things people wish to say hidden in characters, metaphors, and subplots.
I’m also a firm believer that anyone can be a writer. There is no wrong way to do this, not when English is convoluted enough as it is. All it takes is the confidence to write it all down, to put it out there. Without that confidence, I would not be here, and neither would you, Reader.