Turning in homework, 10 months late.

When Theresa Williams first started blogging, back at the "other" place, she did a fabulous job of reaching out to people and trying to find those with whom she could connect. Several people were drawn to her like moths to light, mesmerized by the brightness of her insight and the deepness of soul. She is a very honest woman, one who, I imagine, would look me square in the face and tell me to "Buck up" if I needed it. Thusly, I admired her mojo.

In her efforts to find her niche she started this little game of interviewing different people. She would send them five questions by e-mail and then they were to answers those questions in their own journals. We called them journals. Now this woman is very well educated, is a University Professor and published novelist; so her questions were very precise. And deep. I should have recognized that.

But I did not. I tend to be..to be naive. Lisa, from Better Terms, once called me an innocent.

So, being an innocent, I chimed in with a request that I be interviewed by Ms. Williams too. Being the kind of woman she is, she asked me the kinds of questions one wishes someone would not have asked. She asked me those deep-soul-searching-can't-I-just-take-the-fifth type of questions. Not all of them are those types of questions but a few of them made me so, so uncomfortable that I simply printed out the e-mail, hit delete and tucked in my purse for the last ten months.

Every now and then I would pull it out and think about the answers. That is a really long time to work on homework. A really long time to think about an assignment. But life is an assignment. We are all sent here to learn and grow. That is why are human beings and not human dones.

So, without further ado, here is my very late interview with Ms. Theresa Williams:

Sunday April 17, 2005:
Your interview questions by Theresa Williams:

1. You've expressed many times in your journal and in comments to my journal that writing is very important to you. Could you elaborate, using similes or metaphors, on what the writing experience is like for you? (Writing is like __________; it is like ________; it is like _________.) Try to use at least five similes / metaphors.




How does one begin expressing in words what it is like to live to write? To really convey the simplest and purest part of my soul in such a way that you, the reader, knows that writing is like the blood that flows threw my veins and sustains my very heart beat. Writing is the reason that I rise in the morning and seek out new adventure. Writing gives me the hope that maybe, just maybe I can reach out and feel the essence of another's soul rub against mine, whether that person is living now, lived before me or may live in the future. Writing is like the rising of the sun and the breath of God. Writing is like the dew on the grasses of tomorrow, the wetness of it allows new births in the minds of us all. Writing is like, is like...writing is the first way I ever learned about the great I Am.


2. A lot has been written about writing as healing and the relationship between writing and suffering. What is your take on this?



Ah, and now this is the essence of mankind. The suffering. The healing. The endless cycle back and forth between growth and stagnated mucking about in self pity. Can writing really heal a person and heal a relationship? Can it heal a relationship that is long past healing or even impossible to heal because one of the parties has ceased living? Writing is a powerful tool for communicating ideas and feelings; a way to speak to the secret parts of the heart. The parts that most of us keep tucked safely away and never want to acknowledge.

I happen to know, on a very personal level, that writing is a perfect tool for healing for some people. Especially if the person already loves to write. I have shared before that I was molested after my father was murdered...and have hinted at the fact that the hospital allowed me to use writing and keeping a journal as one of my main forms of therapy. What many people glossed over was the word hospital.

I was there for eight weeks at the tender age of 13.

That was a long, long time ago and that was the primary factor that stopped our foster license. The state didn't know how all that played into my current emotional state.

Am I okay now? (Yes I am, I have it in writing. LOL)

I still journal, but now I call it a blog. I still get feed back about what I write...but now I call the feedback my friends and not Doctor. This journal is very much like the ink and paper journal that I kept at the age of 13 in a private mental health hospital, trying to learn to deal with the traumas of life.

I do not see any differences between now and then, except that my issues have changed.

Now, ten months later, I have read her book, The Secret of Hurricanes. I am sure that she is sitting at her computer right now with her jaw hanging open and her month gasping for air. To understand why you will have to buy and read the book.

Don't worry my dear, I am a very, very strong woman.

Not at all like Pearl and yet, just like her.

3. In Pink Floyd's The Wall, Pink goes through a dark night of soul searching, forgetting why he became an artist and building a wall between himself and the world. He finds himself and breaks through the wall as a result of remembering his experience of writing poetry as a child. What "heals" his alienation is his "little black book with the poems" in it. Tell us about your earliest writing experiences in school. If a movie were made about your life, what would it show about your early writing experiences and how they affect you now?


Hummm....when I first read this question I started humming The Wall, like you probably just did too. It is something that can't be helped, unless you are too young or too old to know the tune. And the tune distracted me enough that I had to put it out of my mind and re-read the question. I think my mind and heart does that, distracts me, to protect me from the answers....because I know the answers and do not always like them.

School.

I was a smart kid. A geeky kid. And shy. I started developing long before anyone else did in the entire universe...at least that is how it felt. This was in the seventies when little pixie types were all the rage and I was not a little pixie type. I was tall for my age and built like the proverbial brick _ _ _ _ house. In sixth grade I was already buying my bras in the woman's department and there is just something desperately wrong with that. No one else in my class, in my school, heck in Phoenix, Arizona was growing their own Valley right there on their chest so I felt alone.

This is all important embellishments for my answer. Because it is my blog and no grades will be given for this assignment, I can take all the time I want.

LOL.

So, in seventh grade my area that we lived in changed school zones AGAIN, which meant I was now going to school with a whole bunch of kids I did not know. These kids had all gone to school together since the womb and had their own little clicks. I had big knockers. And braces. And I was taller than the starting captain of the basketball team. And my skin refused to clear up. And then, I was smart too. Damn the luck.

But this new school was on the cutting edge and put us smart kids in a group all together were we took all our core classes with each other for the full two years of middle school. Amen sisters and brothers! I had a ready made click. My teachers were Artsy and Smart and probably just like Ms. Williams would be.

They made us journal and turn them in once a week. I see a pattern in my life. Everywhere I go people make me write to fit in. But they also graded our grammar, spelling and style. Just not our thoughts. They would make useful suggestions to us and give us books. These are the teachers that kept me from killing myself when I was hospitalized. They were reading my journals.....

Mrs. Wykoff is the teacher that gave me The Prophet by Gibran after my father was murdered. She is the same teacher who told me my sorrow could be flavored by my joy if I choose it.

These two "core" teachers taught me the lust of writing. They are my reason for loving all the humanities and they introduced to opera, plays, poetry, literature and really myself.

I think that answers the movie question too, doesn't it?


4. Who was your worst English teacher ever, and why?


The answer to this one is heart breaking because he is one of the reasons that I went from the age of 17 until 29 without writing hardly anything at all. I did not even keep private paper and ink journals faithfully, even though I knew the value and importance of them.

Senior year of high school and I am in, of course, Advanced Placement English . I belonged in the class because of my test scores, but the man hated me. Or I, in my youthfulness, thought he did. I did not even need the credits to graduate, my English credits were done...I just loved English. Dr. Sergeant...other students in geek English were the apple of his eye. Anything that they wrote, he seemed to love. Anything I wrote...he hated. I was use to being the star of any English class and an A minus was an insult to me. He once gave me a D on an Essay about the Sound and Fury because he said my writing lacked maturity...I said:

"I am seventeen years old, what the heck do you expect?"

He would make comments in the margin of my papers in red ink that said:

Lacks original thought.

Not cohesive.

Word choice.

I wanted to show him word choice.

I wanted to show him cohesive.

I wanted to show him original thought.

Instead the son of a gun won; I stopped writing. He took my one form release in his attempt to make me a better writer. As a senior in high school I had big dreams of being a professional writer. ~~~> My mom has since told me that he thought I was a good writer that needed more discipline. He thought I was the best writer in my class but he never told me that. He was a dream snatcher in my eyes.

Now I am a stupid accountant.

I hate math.

There is bitterness for you.


5. What is a central image that you come back to again and again in your mind-a symbol, a memory, or a metaphor that explains what you long for? Write about it in a way that truly helps us to see this image the way you do.

gently the leaves cradle me
blowing wind to and fro
weaving lake-water scent

over my memories
seeping into today
the first time God spoke to me

lime greens dance softly
and daddy was there
suddenly, no more

ocean waves now substitute
that two year olds glimpse
and beaches become

filled with sand castles
of child's play laughter and
my endless desire for You

My earliest memory of God speaking my name is seeing the wind blow in the trees at the lake.

I was two.

I have been looking for Him ever since, it is what I long for the very most.