Last Train Out with Mamie Morgan: Things We Want To Say
Junior year of high school, because I’d managed to fail the state driving test more than twice, my father drove us to the college where he worked so I could audition for the five-week Governor’s School creative writing summer program.
The rumor from kids who’d attended before me was that the instructors’ questions were intense, the program would be competitive and we auditioners should plan accordingly.
I didn’t know how one planned accordingly for a creative writing interview. I was 16.
I’d read Thoreau’s Walden, all things Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. I’d memorized Etheridge Knight’s epic poem Belly Song for extra credit in English class. I’d watched every episode of My So-Called Life and kept an extensive denim-covered diary that chronicled not much more than all the boys I wanted to kiss. This pretty much sums up the extent of my preparation.
Long story short: I bombed the interview. I am a terrible public speaker. I am sometimes an even worse private speaker. And if you think three adult published writing teachers sitting behind a collapsible catering table asking pointed questions isn’t public, well, you and my child self will have to agree to disagree.
The reason I remember my answers is because, inexplicably, I wrote them down afterward in said aforementioned diary. Apparently, the most mortifying call and response went something like this:
Fiction teacher: What are your thoughts on revision?
Me: Revision? I don’t believe in it. I like to write what I write and never look at it again.
To state the absolute obvious, there is only one correct response to this question, which apparently goes something like: I love revision. I love to reconsider what I’ve made. This translates roughly into: I am teachable. I am humble. I will not lead with juvenile stubborn hubris.
***
As a kid, I desperately wanted to be liked. Somehow, though, that desire never caused me to cave when it came to articulating or standing up for things in which I believed. For example: Sure, I prayed nightly that the soccer player one year older would ask me to prom, but I wasn’t about to agree with him the day he stated in speech and debate class that Fiona Apple sucked, quote unquote.
Her album Tidal had singlehandedly saved my fall semester, and I wasn’t just going to let some boy get away with dismissing her, which I said to him, before explicating ad nauseum the genius of her song “Shadowboxer.”
For whatever reason, as much as 16-year-old me got wrong, she got some pretty fundamentally important things right.
***
Maybe it’s because of social media, or the Internet in general. Maybe it’s because of some late onset keeping-up-with-the-Joneses ideology that hit in adulthood. Whatever the case, I sometimes fall prey to letting that desire to be liked overshadow the actual things I want to do, the actual things I want to say, even what I’d like to make.
***
Creating art is an interesting space, in that we make something in private or collaboratively and from there decide what we want to do with it, if anything.
If I’m being honest, the reason I wanted to become a writer as a child was because I desired a way of communicating with people that I couldn’t manage to figure out in real life.
You’re probably not supposed to say that. In an interview, you’re probably supposed to say that you fell in love with literature first, the building of worlds through words, the craft of it all. Which I did – eventually, many years later.
But at first I wanted to know and be known.
***
My best friend’s son Hudson is a freshman in college and when she and I were initially getting to know one another, he was in kindergarten and elementary school. Hud and I hit it off right away, kindred spirits as my mother might say.
But something that often stumped Hud was that I didn’t seem to value the same things he valued.
“You like cheeseburgers?” he’d ask.
“I don’t eat red meat,” I’d report.
“But you love scary movies, right?”
“Nope.”
“Not even the ones that are also supposed to be funny, like Scream?” He was a very advanced child.
“Nope.”
“Video games???”
“You’re not going to enjoy my answer, kid.”
It’s so interesting, all that we want to show each other, all the things we want to say, all the stuff we create as a way of saying hello.
This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Last Train Out with Mamie Morgan: Things We Want To Say
