Finding my way as a writer through keeping journals!

I continue to learn from the journals I kept almost 40 years ago.

In this excerpt, I’m beginning to know consciously what it’s like to be haunted by stories and or characters and or situations. So much wants to be written and clamors for attention. But I don’t have the time. Can I pull it off? Do I have the insight? I’m eager to begin writing. I’m curious to know what I know.

The importance of keeping close to poetry and literature is that it keeps the reader near his or her emotional life as the writer shares his or hers. Writing in the poem about my aunt Jenny is evidence of that, and it also shows me how I can draw from my early years in ways I haven’t attempted.

Aunt Jenny was overweight all of her life, but it was an essential part of her personality. She also had a kind of mustache that didn’t seem to bother her, was three times the size of her husband, my uncle Donnie, and didn’t try to fulfill some cultural ideal of what a woman/mother should be or do.

Some of my most memorable summers as a kid were spent at Jenny and Donnie’s place at High River, about forty miles from Calgary. I recall going there for two weeks in my 11^th year. I’d begun to be aware of boys and felt deeply excited about attracting them, but feeling their presence in the world also rattled me. When I took a walk by myself and saw a boy nearby, I couldn’t seem to shake him from my mind. I became extremely self-conscious, so aware that an unfamiliar BOY was close. But I hadn’t a clue what to do with that knowledge or how to respond to this creature.

My breasts had also started to form. I recall so vividly the bumps that first appeared. They were extremely painful and distorted my whole sense of my body. It didn’t seem to fully belong to me any longer. And these bumps accompanied my sudden awareness of boys, the other, as something special, something I was drawn to almost beyond my will.

I discovered something else that summer. Jenny was unconventional in other ways. For lunch, she would empty the fridge and put bologna, peanut butter, dill pickles, mustard, mayonnaise, jam, tomatoes, cucumber, onions, and whatever leftovers lurked there onto the kitchen table. Then we’d proceed to make ourselves sandwiches from combinations I never would have connected if I hadn’t come under Jenny’s spell. She freed me from thinking I had to follow the conventional route, the kinds of sandwich combos I’d experienced in the past. After that, sandwiches became works of art where I combined things I never would have considered previously: between two slices of various kinds of bread I would put peanut butter, mayo, mustard, jam, bologna, onions, and whatever else I fancied. Such freedom!

And now to apply it to writing. How do I still stop myself from making delicious combinations in the poetry and narratives I create?