Write it Forward

This week MFAC alum Maggie Moris* shares a story about the power of taking the time to write something by hand and how stumbling across a long-forgotten letter can bring important memories surging back to life.

I miss her.

My maternal grandmother, Mary Jane Swan, took me in to live with her at a time when I needed out of a toxic relationship. On a late November night nearly twenty years ago, I called her in desperation. I barely spoke three words before she said, “You don’t have to explain. The front door’s unlocked. I’ll wait up.”

I miss her for that large love gesture. I miss her for the countless smaller acts that made her an enormous presence in my life. I miss her small kitchen and the tiny table by the window where love was offered up alongside warm slices of homemade bread shimmering with melted butter.

So when, earlier this November, I stumbled upon an old forgotten card from her – found in a completely unexpected place – it was as if she found a way to reach across the great divide between us and offer comfort and love all over again.

Packed over the three blank panels of the greeting card, her strong upward-tilted hand marched through seventeen sentences, each one a declaration of the dearest pieces of her world. Her unique choices for spelling and punctuation trumpeted her fierce personality.

“Dear Maggi! What a nice surprise! To hear from you.”

She wrote about baking bread, about her gardens and of preparations to overwinter plants.

“… putting them in the garage, temporarily to get used to coming indoors.”

She mentioned a cousin living in Toronto with a new husband and their limited finances. 

“Bob can only take a few classes this year.”

She touched upon the Brazilian foreign exchange student that she and grandpa hosted when they were in their late sixties. Then, she noted her plans to go to church later that day before having dinner with my parents. Finally, she ended the card with news that she had attended a wedding reception the nite (sic) before:

“…so many of our neighbors were there. Danced, too.”

Danced, too…

Seventeen sentences and the whole heart of her life was offered up, a condensed remembrance of hearth, home, family, faith, community, hospitality, and dancing …

Which brings me to now and to you.

In this season of mostly mass-produced holiday missives, can we choose to write one hand-written note? Pick a child - any child – or anyone near and dear, close or far, and send something of yourself via a paragraph or two with your scribbles and scratches. Start a conversation. Open up a dialogue for later. (Replace, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with, “What world problem would you like to solve?”)

A written-by-hand note, with its stamp, postmark, fold and seal is a tangible time capsule. It fixes the here and now in place with heart-meant-ness. Something written by hand bears your unique script in a way that a typewritten font simply cannot. 

Can Not.

Even if Grandma Swan had written her seventeen sentences in an e-mail and even if I had printed that e-mail and saved it, the experience of reading her words would not be the same.

I believe that something elusive and ethereal attaches itself to our squiggles and loops, slashes and dashes. We impart an invisible energy through our physical touch, even if only through pen to paper. As writers we are uniquely – if not exclusively – positioned to send many such small emissaries out into someone’s future moment – moments we can’t see or anticipate, but important connections nonetheless.

Grandma Swan died on December 14, 2005. Ten years have passed since I last held her hand. Yet, those five or ten minutes she took to compose her thoughts on that day, on this card, ensured that the future me could one day feel her touch again.

A present day spirit created with the corporeal hand of the past … a lost letter full to the brim with tidings of comfort and joy.

Happy Holidays, dear friends.

I hope you write.

I hope you dance.

*Maggie Moris (a.k.a. M. A. Moris) writes middle-grade novels. She plans to write a personal card to all four of her nieces and nephews this Christmas. She is a 2009 Hamline graduate and has asked Santa for a few more Twitter followers @maggiemoris. Her website is http://www.maggiemoris.com

A Letter on the Importance of Writing Groups

Who writes letters anymore?  In this fast-paced age of email blasts, instant messaging, and texting it seems no one has time to write more than two sentences at a time.  Well, not everyone has given up on letter writing yet.  

Today Polly McCann* has written a special letter to all of us reading The Storyteller's Inkpot on the value of a writer's group.  If you enjoy it, I encourage you to check out her blog, Letters From Polly, to read more of her letters.

Dear Friends,

I decided to write you all a letter (as I can't seem to stop writing them) about what I've been doing since graduating from Hamline's MFAC program. It hasn't all been avoiding bifocals and moving into my mother's basement. (Hah, I'm not making this stuff up.) No, a lot of great things have happened as I've found ways to get started on the journey that is the writing life.

The best tools for that journey are not only the ergonomic chair and writing desk (or Google fiber being installed by zippy little blue trucks filled with chipper workmen who introduce you to their cousins and fix your printer no charge). No. What I'm taking about is your writing group. You need one.

Yes to get started as a writer I found I needed other people. The best work I've written since graduating from Hamline several years ago were projects I finished in order to submit to my writers' group. I could spend all my time writing bad poetry. But in the end, I found I needed that accountability to keep me going; remind me I'm not insane just because I chose to be a writer; and give me a deadline.

I just have to show up to group with something good. Shame is a motivator, but more than that it's friendship. Let me tell you what happened. . . . A few years ago I decided to host a SCBWI group. I met Johanna. She, noticing that I had a newborn baby, and a degree to finish, and that my house wasn't properly dusted, then promptly took over the group and moved it to Panera. I was thankful.

Johanna inspired me. She wrote every day and submitted work frequently. It was for Johanna I dredged up a poem about the novel I intended to write. I had no words for a project I intended to write. With the support and encouragement of my writer's group, my empty page became 60 words and those 60 words became 30 scenes.

Last year I met again some of the people from my old writer's group at our annual SCBWI conference in Kansas City. There we talked about Johanna's recent passing. She had spent the last years in and out of chemo and would write the entire five hours during her treatments. I don't know how you would feel, but we felt we owed it to Johanna to begin our group again.

So I started a writer's group at my local library through the SCBWI. Thirty glistening-eyed-authors-to-be came to the first meeting.  When people bring their work and show me how far they've come-- I think of Johanna and how her commitment spreads. I think of all the professors who poured so much passion and knowledge into me. I think about how we are changing hearts and minds, lighting them like candles, one word at a time. Even if it is only our own heart and the group we meet at the library on Saturday mornings, or the group we meet on Google Chat on Thursdays at three o'clock during the little one's nap time. Even so, it's worth it. My heart needs it.

Writer's group is where I learn what I did right. Oh, I know I do a lot of things wrong. I miss a lot. My dialogue will never sparkle like Ron Koertge. My rhythm will never sing like J.J's "worm meets worm." My fantasy will never reach the height of Georgia B. But in the end, I will find my voice. And my writer's group lets me know the good notes I hit along the way.

Since I graduated from Hamline, my writer's journey has had some perilous turns. My life has been turned up side down and right side up. But through writing and through my community I've found "my secret love for hearts," as my daughter calls it. I've found my way home.

Dear Polly,

Thank you for taking the time to write this wonderful letter and agree to share it on The Storyteller's Inkpot.  Letter writing is an under-appreciated art form, and this topic was a superb one.

P.S. - Feel free to send us another letter anytime!

*Polly McCann, artist, writer, and mother, earned her MFA in writing from Hamline University. Tea with Alice is the working title for her first collection of autobiographical poems; three generations of stories retold in free verse. She has been published in Naugatuck River Review and Arc 24. She is the owner of NewThing Art Studio in Kansas City Crossroads arts district. She loves to grow basil and explore unexpected surprises in her free time.