On Nostalgia
Dear friends,
As you know, I (Emily) have been struggling with writing. I still write poetry every day, I do not love everything I am writing at the moment, but I am chugging along, hoping for something beautiful to emerge. At times of dryness, we feel that it is helpful to go back to your roots—the whys of your writing. So today, we are going to tell our origin stories of what got us to start writing. The writers, poets, people, and places that made us fall in love with writing in the first place. As we write our thoughts, we hope that reading them is as useful to you as writing out our thoughts was for us. Maybe you can find some inspiration from our pasts…
I (Emily) remember my Kindergarten teacher gave everyone Hilroy notebooks to keep a journal. Mine happened to be pink. I think she scribed for me something about a pig. I remember my Grade One teacher reading a story about a Girl with a Green Ribbon. It had a grisly ending. I remember stealing change to buy books from the Scholastic Books Catalogue. I was poor and I wanted that picture book about a mother and her favorite floral chair. I remember reading about Helen of Troy when I was ten. I remember that Miss Chow, my English teacher in Hong Kong, noticed my writing and encouraged me to continue. I remember the first time I paid attention to poetry was when she read “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost out loud. I remember in 2003, a biopic of Sylvia Plath came out. The movie was awful, but I promptly went out to buy all her books. I remember reading “Tulips” and thinking, “Wow, someone finally gets me.” I remember feverishly writing poems in class and filling up two notebooks. I remember tearing said notebooks to shreds because some boy I liked from another school laughed at me wanting to be a poet. After a bad breakup, I picked up writing poems again. In my mid-twenties, I encountered Jesus, but I stopped writing again because neither my church at that time nor my theology had any room for it. I remember giving away all my poetry and fiction books. But like a stubborn itch, I remember God calling me back to writing and I remember starting all over again.
When I (Julia) was a young girl, I was fascinated by books. I made them with staples and scribbles. I read them, delighted in them, and imagined I would be an author someday. My mother
would read aloud Shel Silverstein. She had a few poems from Where the Sidewalk Ends memorized. We’d read Robert Frost, too. And we had plenty of other poetry collections for children. My mother had a knack for reading with enthusiasm and great attention to meter. Turns out she had a knack for writing with great meter too, as her children’s books can attest. We would rewrite the lyrics to songs with sillier words that still fit the rhyme and rhythm. I wrote little stories out of my spelling lists instead of using the words in separate, unrelated sentences. My mom read us beautiful things like Road Dahl and Lewis Carrol. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and more lyrical things like Kate DiCamilo and Cornelia Funke. She was discovering the magical world of books right along with us.As I got older, I turned to fantasy books. I’d write stories out of my wild imaginings. Later, I’d find my passion in music. For a while that eclipsed my love of writing, but I still maintained a blog and read fantasy and wrote longingly about nature and love and God. It seemed that no matter what I did, a writer is still what I am. I found my way back to writing poetry in high school. I’d read a lovely verse novel, Song of the Sparrow by Lisa Ann Sandell, which blended Arthurian fantasy with lyrical, moving verse. My mother read it, too, and wrote her own verse novel, which made me believe perhaps I could do it too. I’d scribble poems and verses, and in high school I took a creative writing class as an elective, where I was introduced to forms and to TED KOOSER. Ted Kooser stands out in my mind especially, because of how inviting his poems were, and they were everything I ever dreamed of writing. I found a similar admiration of Billy Collins in my tenth-grade lit class. Poetry became the pulse in my heart of hearts as a writer. Since then it has only grown and grown.
I found my way into poetry a little backwards. First I grew to love it, then I wrote it, and then I began to truly dig in and enjoy reading it. Reading it has helped me grow, but those first few poets I encountered really just made me believe I could write poetry for myself. It wasn’t until my passion for poetry grew that I began looking to hone my craft by reading more poetry. I feel nostalgic for the girl in tenth grade, scribbling poems because they felt right. She poured all her unhindered naivety and love and angst onto the page. Maybe literary critics would shudder at how her heart burst at the beauty of nature, how evident it was from her writing that she was (is) a hopeless romantic. I’ve come a long way now in how I think about craft and how I write, but I like to believe she’s still in there.
Our Favourite Nostalgic Things
This recipe for Peanut Butter Cookies is my favourite. They taste exactly how I remembered them at Big Sister camp.
A movie that never fails to invoke nostalgia for my time in Asia.
That book I mentioned in my story.
This series opened up the possibilities of storytelling to me when I was young.
This poem my (Julia’s) mother used to read aloud to me.