Writing

So, as I descend into working day boredom here, I've been trying to think of ways to still feel creative and engaged... and I've been wondering if this summer would be a good time to return to the wrestling match I've had most of my life with the question of whether I'm "a writer."

People have been telling me that since I was in grammar school, when I started writing short stories, mostly about little girls. My family's favorite was "The Floppy Flowered Hat," which was about a little girl whose new hat was eaten by her pet goat! In middle school, my friend Margaret and all my classmates all got really into this fact about me and they kind of made it my "thing." Heidi was the writer. One kid, Brian Lewis, always made me promise that I wouldn't use a pen name he wouldn't recognize, so he could look for my books when we were grown ups. I messed around with writing in high school, but more in college, where I worked on the student literary magazine, did an English major, TAed a creative writing class, wrote my two theses on women's use of language (around their bodies and then politics) and read manuscripts for a professor's literary journal, The Artful Dodge.

Since college, I've messed around with words in my journals, in sermons, and in grad school papers, sort of, but I don't know if this really all adds up to "I'm a writer." I always thought that if writing really was my passion, I wouldn't be able to not do it. I haven't written a short story in almost a decade. I haven't written a poem in years. "Writer" feels like some elusive, romantic label for a person I'm not sure I ever was. Now, I feel this pressure to FIND something to write about - a topic in ministry, a passion, whatever lesson it is I think I have to tell the world about. What am I supposed to sit down at my desk and work on? Nothing like that has ever revealed itself to me. So, I'm not sure if all this business about "writing" is really part of my sense of call or just some kind of pressure that follows me around.

It was easy to "write things" when I was a kid. I just wrote about whatever was around me. I didn't mind that I was unfocused about the whole thing. I remember once, Margaret challenged me to write 100 words about a science experiment in class that was boring us to death - just a piece of potato in a test tube of water. And I did it! And it was fun. I remember she was impressed, and she was excited to watch me do it. That makes me think of preaching actually, take a random, obscure text from the Bible and find something to say about it. Some scripture can seem about as inspiring as a piece of potato in a test tube.

Blogging is really great in that way. I can write about random stuff, just like when I was ten, fourteen, and twenty. I can experiment with all of you, and find interesting things to say about ordinary sorts of things that exist around the edges of my life. I like the photography aspect a lot, too. (Actually, I started begging my dad for a camera when I was about ten, too.)

So maybe I don't need to find a Grand Subject or go searching for my Poetic Voice, so much as I'll keep doing this, writing a blog, taking pictures, and just ruminating on the world. And maybe that's the thing - that this is the kind of writing I can't stop doing?