With 2023 comfortably entrenching itself into everyone’s lives, I find myself reminiscing about what made me begin writing. Two things used to happen that influenced me. My uncle Jim read to me from a big book of children’s Bible stories. I still have it, with its beautiful illustrations and large print. It i from the late forties/early fifties, and had belonged to his baby brother, George. Well, three things happened, because George told me stories when I was around four, of Tudor history and Renaissance wars. He also took me to libraries and book stores. The third thing that happened was my Dad making up bedtime stories about the mouse police, and village inhabited by bunnies, squirrels, birds, and other animals that I liked.
Books were always number one in my house, and my mother
signed me up for a child’s book of the month club. Later, I was part of the Great Books after
school program, sort of a grade school book club. I was
first in line at the Scholastic book sales, and sales of used books our
teachers had once in a while.
I liked writing stories in school, as well as little poems. I also enjoyed making stories up for my cousins, and my classmates. By age ten, I was part of a writers group, where three of us wrote stories and shared them with each other.
By junior high, I was doing my own “books”, reports on different topics illustrated with Xeroxed pictures, or illustrations my Mom and I found in old textbooks from Kresge’s and Woolworth’s. They always had a bibliography, and I always got As on them. They may have been homework, but I liked compiling them. Before I learned to type, I wrote the text by hand, laboring to make my handwriting, if not pretty, legible.
Since then, I’ve written, compiled, edited, almost nonstop. I jot notes wherever I can, and have a whole library of journals with ideas, perhaps more than I’ll live to write. I’m still at it, in short.
Saturday, a friend connected with our local writing center brought me some books on dolls, but also some albums her own mother had compiled, full of photos and information on dolls and figurines. I was over the moon. This was a woman who was a kindred spirit. She even used the same albums we had used to create scrapbooks of our family photos and mementos. This urge to compile and conserve has dictated my professional life, and also my museum. I have a book showing my business plan with sketches and ideas. I also have research files and notes, and of course, a very big library. My family is full of artists, teachers, and writers. My grandmother was poor, and only went to school till she was eleven. She and my other grandmother studied to be seamstresses. Yet, my mother’s mother clipped out poems, and held them together with safety pins, making little chapbooks of her own. I have them now, with her quilts, lace doilies, and doll clothes. I’m like one of her quilts, all these pieces of my life sewn together with a pen, and my memories, compiled into books, poems, essays, and more.
