The earliest time that I can remember trying to write is the 5th grade.
With a dull pencil on rough recycled paper, I tried to get everything that was swimming around in my head out into the world.
I was used to being by myself. I grew up in a two parent household but my parents are both professional and I was the only child on my block. So I was by myself – I didn’t play t-ball and I didn’t play little league – I dreamt. Pretending, making my own friends, having my own adventures.
But I grew up around lovers of design- living in and around historic districts and riding in classic cars. Around the same time that I began writing, I was lucky enough to have a teacher plan an architecture club to try to bring that love floating in town and focus it in a way that 10 year olds could grow into. We were required to write an essay to be invited-in. I was so interested, so excited, so cautious that I asked my family friends who were architects for advice and many others to look over my essay. I might be able to dig up a copy of that labored-over essay, if I can boot up my parent’s old Compaq Presario computer. But I think it probably just says something like ‘no seriously, I’m really excited to spend more time learning and engaging with architecture…”
In any case, I did get in – my essay was excepted but I’m sad to say that club never actually got a chance to start. We ended up on indefinite hold when our advisor began to undergo treatment for breast cancer. I hope that treatment has progressed over the past 25 years.
I won’t tell you that my interest in architecture and creativity died when our teacher did- that’s extreme. My interest if anything is stronger today then it was before. But when you grow-up in the suburbs and you begin to start puberty, you’ll notice that if you see yourself with a boyfriend or a girlfriend or gasp a parent that approves of seeing you, you’re going to need to be heading somewhere – you’re going to need to get a job when you grow up. Around that time, my previous strength in math skills just started coming under question. But maybe writing could be the ticket.
You can work on writing but how do you work on getting a writing job? What does that look like? The concept of a book seemed to be something that you birth while you’re at your family’s lake house or something that you do while you’re making your money in an office during the day.
Unless you report on what’s going on around you.
Three newspapers arrived at our house each week. All three of them are shadows of what they were in the 90’s but it just seemed to be the easiest way to make it happen.
I got a chance to give it a shot and join the school newspaper, in jr. high. Did it come with any teaching? any organization? any readership? any response to work either positive or negative? Not that I recall but there was a newsroom to work-in and deadlines that I could meet and bylines that could hold my name.
Beginning sophomore year of high school, there was an honors-level journalism class to introduce us to a ‘real’ newspaper-A school paper with a decades-long archive and a wall of awards. The class was darn near a prerequisite not only to start college at Medill (Where I imagined myself headed) but also, in theory, the first attempt to strengthen our basic english class writing skills and begin to, in a more focused way, actually teach us how to do this stuff properly.
Let me mention now that I did not have a straight and narrow academic track. I was gifted or I was remedial depending on how I acted in class, whether the teacher was there to teach, or if something needed an explication.
If I was overly-hyper and had questions and needed help in a room full of kids who ended up i the 1500’s on their SAT, Why bother with me?
By the time journalism came about, I was in the regular, middle of the road, state school, English track.
Luckily for me, My freshman year english teacher was also the department head – and he knew that he had a kid with an interest in writing. And so in the spring I went up to him
“As you know, I’m working to become a journalist. This is the first time when I’ve had a focus of choice that has been so perfect! I know that getting placement into journalism would require a sign-off because it’s honors but that’s why I’m coming to you.”
Mr Grieve double-checked his grade book and tried to keep his face neutral. He closed the book and looked to the sky paused in thought. “Do you have a writing sample from outside of class that you can show me? I know you spend most of your time in class working on some novel; Maybe that could be a good option…”
“Gladly”.
I spent the whole weekend removing comma splices and misspellings and, come Monday morning, I happily presented my latest and most sweated-over work of fiction.
Mr. Grieve tried to keep his face neutral. “I’m afraid that I can’t let you in.”
While the department didn’t think I could stay above water and understand all of the learning they’d prepared on the craft of journalism, the teacher who advised our previously award winning school newspaper reluctantly let me and a friend of mine onto the newspaper staff that year based on our jr. high school experience
How did it go?
Meh. I published a front page story and lasted…I don’t recall how much longer before they decided that I didn’t have the natural talent to be a journalist and they didn’t have the natural talent to bother to teach me. The most training that I got on staff was a Reporter’s Notebook and the feeling of what it’s like to actually get a hold of a high ranking buinsess official who’s in trouble before he tells you to fuck off and hangs up on you.
While the school newspaper didn’t think much of me, my sophomore year english teacher actually did. He happened to be an aspiring writing as well and felt that pressing on our creativity could only help us progress. That year, we read books and then we met the author. We went to see readings from some crazy-talented unpublished writers – one of whom would end up as patient and supportive of my work as Mr K was that year. My writing was seen as so strong that it earned me extra credit. The year ended with thoughts that I clearly wasn’t being challenged by regular English and would need to hit honors junior year.
I wish that there were more than one Patrick Kemp in my academic life
For years, as I gained a small level of support for my writing and made it into honors and got into a college that my high school dean told me not to even bother applying to, all that I wanted was to stay on track. Stay on the track that looped back to my high school holding a National Book Award that I could turn sideways and shove into my naysayers while accepting my alumni achievement award and asking why their alumni awards didn’t seem to be ones that I could make out.
The main hurdle with that path was, of course, that I needed to let a lot of that shit go. Also, at least for me, it was so easy for my ability to become an accepted writer to only go as far as a dream. You find out what you want to do, you get the seed of an idea, and then you can spend most of your time turning over your acceptance speech – afraid to move past planning less you mess it up on the way there.
Now as I enter my late 30’s, I look back on my fits and starts of success, shoulder rubbing, experience, degrees, positive feedback from some great people and find it still so hard to put word consistently to paper. I can’t let go of the past. I find myself perpetually among my teachers and my classmates – a group reading my work while trying to hide their true questions of how I got there.
My words have had to be perfect and perfect is hard – especially your own perception of perfect.
After years of therapy and, to be fair, years of support from some published friends, I’m going to try, as honestly and hard as I can, to put the band back together.
And our first show takes place in December so it can’t be dismissed as an empty New Year’s resolution. That said, you can feel free to grab a pen and simply track how many entries come in after this.
I’m going to try to will myself to shift from a completely dry person who has showed flashes of talent but only in the way that everyone can have flashes of talent into a truthfully middlingly talented person whose work you’ve actually seen.
Then we can shift back to focus back on the talent.
The Ride's On Fire 