Origin Myths
On a mild spring afternoon sometime in 1992 in Houston, Texas, a famous poet pierced my ear. I don’t know for a fact it was mild, or spring, but I’m extrapolating - we only all ate lunch in the arts breezeway when the weather wasn’t blisteringly hot, and I’m guessing it was spring because, being a freshman only three years away from Barbies, I wouldn’t have had the courage to ask her in the fall. This is how a lot of my creative nonfiction unfolds - I don’t always know exactly how something happened, but I can reliably surmise. It must have been spring. It would have been mild. We were usually all together at lunchtime. I think there was crushed ice from the cafeteria, but I can’t be sure.
(I looked for a picture of the breezeway, but I couldn’t find one. Instead, here are my earrings. We are discussing the second one.)
At the time she was only famous in the way that seniors in high school tended to be famous in the 1990s. (I don’t want to think about how high school seniors experience fame now.) She was ethereal and pale, brilliant while being quiet. I don’t remember if she was the editor of our literary magazine, but it didn’t much matter, because I watched her as if she was. Freshmen have a way of osmoting information about the kids they look up to. We don’t know everything, but we know a lot. We glean who they’re dating. We ask where they plan to go to college. We study how they dress. We examine what they are reading, and how they talk about it. We observe how they engage with, and sometimes shut down, the mouthy boy fiction writers in our creative writing class. I knew she couldn’t be my friend, not in the way girls in my class could be. But she could be my subject.
I’m asked all the time on these myriad podcasts and at book events if I knew since I was a child if I wanted to be a writer. On my cynical days (I have them), I suspect it’s because that way the interviewers don’t have to read the book. But on my hopeful days, I think about what our origin myths are. When did you know you wanted to be a writer? When did you know you wanted to be? When did you know? Another way of asking that question is, who taught you to be a writer? What does being a writer mean? How can being a writer work? Who do you look to, when you study “being a writer”?
The famous poet has no memory of piercing my ear during lunch. I also don’t remember how we arrived at this arrangement, though I suspect it was as casual as my asserting one afternoon as we loafed around waiting for creative writing class to start - it was the last class of the day, and so we were all lazy and chatty and draped over our desks like vines by 2:45 - that I wished I could have a second hole in my ear, and her casually offering to do it for me. Really? I probably said. Sure, she probably answered. Why not?
A passing favor in her life, leaving a permanent mark in mine. I enjoy the simultaneous symmetry and asymmetry of this story. Thirty years later, the famous poet is, in actual fact, a professional poet. The freshman in creative writing class with her, glimmering under her passing attention, is a professional writer. Two real, improbable things, kindled to life in the same classroom, connected by the hole in my ear.
So what’s next?
First, I will embarrass the poet by sharing this Substack all over creation. Then, on Wednesday evening, I’ll be doing a virtual event with the Ashland Public Library at 7 pm, with signed books available to order from Aesop’s Fable bookstore. Then I’ll toot off to the Southwest Florida Reading Festival on Saturday. The following week - this is new - I’ll record part of the audio edition of The Penguin Book of Pirates, which is going to be released in a scant two months. On March 21, I’ll be at the Virginia Festival of the Book. And then things will start to get a little crazy. As crazy as asking a girl to pierce your ear during lunch? Maybe.