Slice of Life: Own Your Words, but Not Their Reaction 15 of 31

For the month of March, I'll be writing with the Slice of Life community. Disclaimer: I'll be writing every day so the writing will be a bit unpolished most days. Thanks to Two Writing Teachers for bringing this community together and for inspiring me to try to find the stories that surround me each day.

Sitting beside this stranger reading my words, I couldn't help but be uncomfortable.  A high school student at the time, I wasn't very comfortable with myself let alone someone else reading my every word.  He read the poem resting in his hands and looked at me questioningly.  Shifting in my cold folding chair, self-conscious of my work, I tried to straighten my body to appear attentive and calm.  Here was a man I did not even know, evaluating my words as if he somehow held some magical wisdom.

I wish I could remember the few questions he asked that day, but I cannot.  That year I had decided to take two projects for 4-H.  The first was a lamb that I had spent most of the spring training.  The second was a poem that I had worked to shape.  The lamb had trained quite nicely, but it was the poem I was most proud of that year.  The poem had been inspired by time beside my grandfather.  There was nothing I enjoyed more than time beside my grandpa.  Having been born one day, and many years, apart, he and I just seemed to click.  He shared his wisdom, I shared my questions.  It was our constant conversations about life that became the inspiration for the poem.

The poem from all those years ago.

To this day I know nothing about the man that sat across from me that afternoon.  If he told me his name, I have forgotten.  If there was a reason he was qualified to judge writing, I do not know of it.  I don't remember a smile.  I don't remember a kind word.  I just remember the look on his face - questioning.  I left the table, relieved to be away from the strange quiet of the person across from me.  Later that day, I returned to the table to see my performance, only to find a B ribbon on my poem.  Maybe he didn't like the poem's style.  Maybe he didn't like the lack of formal rhythm or the line breaks in the free verse poem he had read.  However, it occurred to me later, that he probably didn't believe I wrote the poem with its shifting perspective from youth to old age.  It occurred to me, he didn't know about the time I spent alongside my grandfather.  It occurred to me, that he likely didn't believe that I had written this poem in a time that you couldn't just run words through a search to check for plagiarization.

None of this really matters now.  I'm the only person who remembers the B, and the only person who remembers this awkward conversation.  Though I haven't forgotten this bump in the writing road, I've been writing long enough to have experienced a few others.  It has never made me put my pen down.  I don't train lambs anymore, but I do still write poetry.  In a chapter titled "Audience" in On Writing Well by William Zinsser (this March Challenge's read for me), Zinsser reminds, "You are writing for yourself (p. 25)."

"On the larger issue of whether the reader likes you, or likes what you are saying or how you are saying it, or agrees with it, or feels an affinity for your sense of humor or your vision of life, don't give him a moment's worry.  You are who you are, and he is who he is, and either you'll get along or you won't."  William Zinsser (p. 26)

 Friends, it's the middle of the month....keep writing.