Timeline #1

In an effort to help me remember why I write I’ve going to try to recount some of the pivotal moments along the way.

When I was in the 7th grade I had Mrs. Brophy for English at State Street Middle School in Alliance, Ohio. For one nine week grading period we had a student teacher who taught us the foundation of poetry. I wish I could remember her name or any sliver of who she was, but I can’t. What I do remember is how big of an influence she was on me.

 

For nine weeks I got to feel like I finally knew what I was good at. I’d been writing short stories for two years. Most of the stories I wrote between 5th grade and graduation are still in a small travelling suitcase in my childhood bedroom closet. This was different. I was able to take all of those lonely feelings  I had being a chubby, quiet, “white” speaking girl who was never going to be popular and channel them into poetry. I wrote a 47 part series called The Outcast about that very subject. I wrote quatrains and cinquains and rhyming poems (the only ones I’d written then and the last as well). I loved getting my weekly poems back with 5/5 and ‘great job’ written on them. I still have one of the last papers she handed back that year. She wrote that I reminded her of Emily Dickenson.

 

Now at the time I had barely had any exposure of poetry other than an Essence collection of black poetry I’d read (I’m pretty sure it had a kente cloth hardcover). So to be compared to some long dead white poet took me aback, but once I learned what her comment meant, I ran with it. From that moment on fiction took a backseat to poetry and my path was set.