Writer's Block

“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.”   ~ Neil Gaiman 


Here’s a secret about me; when I get those annoying security questions that are intended to protect my digital footprint, I always answer the favorite teacher with the same name. Chapman.

In the early 1980s, I was a nondescript and thoroughly uninteresting teenager. Lacking any vision or, in my defense, any encouragement, I bounced from class to class equally happy and unhappy with mediocrity. Yes, I was on the college path – but I found that path to be as dry as I was.  In the absence of a better plan, it at least provided a path. Our high school was large by Southwest Virginia standards. As I would find out later, it paled in comparison to the classes and resources of our northern Virginian cousins. 

We had a 30-minute bus ride over the mountain to Marion. Entering my freshman classes, I struggled woefully with grammar. Tense was my undoing – and still is. I landed like a thud in an English class with an instructor intent on diagraming, parsing, filleting and eviscerating sentences.  In one particularly embarrassing turn of events, I chose to read ‘The Raven’ during forensics. Only to discover that the guy whose turn it was before me had made the same selection. For five minutes, I pondered my humiliation. And then I stood up and read ‘The Raven.’ Appalachian kids in 1980 were not exposed to great literature.

The next year, I was placed in an English class with kids who – shall we say – didn’t have plans to fill out applications to MIT. Or ETSU. Or WCC for that matter (Wytheville Community College – the place to skip-step to something bigger). The teacher in that class just wanted to pass some ideas in front of us and hope that something would stick. So I did OK.

Then came my junior year. Back in the running for the college-prep, I walked into Mrs. Chapman’s class.  Not only that – and I don’t know how this happened - but her Advanced Composition class. It was one of those Providential mysteries that in retrospect, doesn’t make a lot of sense.

And doors started to open. Heck – I didn’t even know there were doors there. Mrs. Chapman was a mid-thirties, sweater-and-skirt-wearing, one-way passage into all things writing. She read The New Yorker. The New Yorker for cryin’ out loud. In Marion, Virginia. In 1982. She was married to an Episcopal priest. He was assigned to serve one of the small churches in the area, which is probably how she landed in the most unexpected of places. Thank God.

Mrs. Chapman wasn’t interested in grammar – although I got the impression she had it mastered.  She was interested in ideas. And getting ideas on paper. My writing then had to be laughable, but she made us write. She would make us write, even when we didn’t have anything to write about.  We would walk in the class and she would say, “You have 50 minutes to turn in two pages on sailing.” Or space. Or trees. By the end of the year, we could pound those two pages out with ease. Again, I imagine my context and construction left a lot to be desired. We were not afraid of writing. I loved it and could plunge into it with abandon. I didn’t know how much I loved it at the time.  And I didn’t fully appreciate her nudgings to pursue it harder. 

 

I couldn’t see that path. I didn’t have the vision. I remember her telling me not to write for the local paper. I expect that was because she wanted me to look beyond these mountains. I’m not sure she understood how difficult that was.

I became an engineer. I graduated from Virginia Tech (barely) with a degree in Civil Engineering and that’s how I make a living here in the mountains. I am a thoroughly average engineer. I appreciate the profession and how we make people’s lives better. I’m left wondering.

Mrs. Chapman left these hills shortly after I graduated. I hope she is well – I hope she knows how little steps make bigger ones. And what a gift vision and encouragement can be. What a wellspring of power and virtue it is. How memories echo down the halls of my mind and call out still for restoration. Words are my comfortable companion these long years.

Thank you, Mrs. Chapman, for the gift.