For decades I've been wanting to call myself a writer. I've been many things, as my family, friends and students will tell you: cabinetmaker, boat builder, crew member, salvage diver, reporter, waitress, house/boat painter, literary agent and, most recently, an English teacher.
For almost two decades I've been helping others to write; first as an agent and now as a teacher. I've taught at Writer's Conference from Whidbey Island to Maui, as well as Montana to Miami. Some Bay Area conferences were small venues where I was invited as a professional courtesy, others as an individual guest to Universities to address MFA students and still others were held in large Silicon Valley ballrooms where the invitation came from a national high brow association.
However, the title I've helped to bestow on others, I've not had the courage to call my own. I'm not afraid of swimming with sharks, jumping over fires, driving fast, barrel racing, any animal, most humans, and yet to stand in the public spotlight and declare "I'm going to call myself a writer" has scared me to my soul.
You see I've wanted to use that title, Writer, as my own since I was 7 years old and wrote this poem:
Sam the horse, so mighty and fine
Sam drank all the turpentine,
Is Sam a Horse?
I knew the power of words right then and there. Let's just say this: When I turned 7 my parents finally divorced. My mother quickly remarried (to a man with four children) and my father started seriously dating (and later married) a woman, with two children, whom my sister and I had known since we were born. No, Sam was not a horse, but rather a hard drinking step-father, but we'll save that for another time. But the power and release from the act of writing that poem during a crumby time as kid gave me an inner strength. One that would help me survive a multitude of life's rogue waves.
My family, which grew after my mother's third marriage, is full of writers, musicians, actors, entrepreneurs, doctors, nurses, artists and teachers. We all want to be of use in our own way.
Even though I was born the eldest of two siblings, by the time I was 25 years old, I'd landed in the bottom quarter of fourteen children! I was not a squeaky wheel and didn't ask for much grease. I was a child of the 60's and 70's. There wasn't much supervision in my parent's era of managing families, especially large, active and independent minded groups like ours.
I've kept journals from the age of 7 until now, the tender age of 52. In October 2011, one of my siblings, Rosette Lattimore, died at this same age: 52. She asked me two questions shortly before she died as we stood in her beloved Willamette River:
1) When are you going to write your own books?
2) What are you going to do about Peter?
Those two questions have haunted me. She'd known me since I was 8 years old, when we met on an Island in Maine. We were chosen sisters (each one of a group of 6 children, at that time) and we wrote each other letters in code (so none of the other's would know our deepest thoughts and feelings). Rosette and I as adults lived in NYC and SF, cities by water, overlapping years. We had our children within years of each other, too. Now she was leaving the earth and asking me these questions...the same questions I asked myself late at night under many a full moon.
In 2012, I answered her second question first. I asked for a divorce from Peter.
In 2015, I'm answering her first question. I'm starting now, publicly and without fear, my dear!
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