Dr. Sylvia Little’s didactic mastery drew us all to English class, with perfect attendance. I was afraid to nap after my bleary-eyed early-morning math course for fear I would miss it. Gears ground and minds opened. Sometimes she just sat on her stool at the front of the room and read to us from our assigned novels. All that she brought to life when she was reading taught us more than any lecture about idioms and protagonists and salient features could have imparted. Much of it was local literature … Sharyn McCrumb, Lee Smith, Clyde Edgerton, Fannie Flagg.

Our writing was her other passion. She made us want to give it to her, and it was her bread and meat, watching her students grow and occasionally experience a light bulb moment.

She’s a dignified Southern lady. She’s in her eighties and is still spreading her contagious passion for literature.

I only had the privilege of studying under Dr. Little for one semester, and at the end of that semester, she summoned me to her office for tea and a chat. There really was a tea tray, a proper one, parked neatly in front of towering stacks of books in front of shelves of books, peppered with folders and photos of a daughter. We talked for two hours, and I was delighted, but baffled by the individual attention. She was at the time one of my minor heroes and objects of fascination, so I drank it all in like sweet tea.

I shared that I had recently started having writing ideas in my car while driving the two-hour rural trip home each weekend, only to lose them. I couldn’t pull over and write them down because I was working three part-time jobs and sometimes barely made it to work on time back in my hometown. I certainly couldn’t scratch them out on a napkin while driving. One goes into a trance while driving roads that long and boring, and the ideas came while I was in that state of mind. I couldn’t recover them while making junior bacon cheeseburgers a few hours later. They were lost.

She listened closely, with her head slightly tilted and a far-away look. And as we talked, her motions as casual as reaching for a tissue or jotting down a quick note, she opened a desk drawer and produced a checkbook, and begin writing out a check. I put it down to eccentricity, and as she continued what could only have been paying a bill she had just remembered, she told me that she was friends with Pat Conroy and several other notable writers. She elaborated on those connections and her voice carried the heavy implication that I in turn had connections through her. She was saying this to a girl who was seventeen years old and had only ever written some papers in her class, so I set my cup down and nodded politely and considered the depths of her eccentricity as I listened.

Our class had just read The Prince of Tides.

She tore the check out neatly, then turned and fixed her gaze on me in a way that transformed that second into a Moment. “This is not a gift, because I am not allowed to give gifts to students. Do you understand?” I nodded, captivated. “This is an investment. A personal one. I am asking you to use this to buy a small tape recorder for your car. It should pay for some batteries, too. This way, you can record those ideas when they come. Never stop writing, Amy. I ask only one thing in return: Promise me you’ll dedicate the first book to me.”

My mother taught me to reflexively reject gifts. Well, more damaged me into it, an indirect lesson that nevertheless has always permeated how I handle receiving them. There was nothing in my personal history that had prepared me for accepting an investment. But in that Moment, all I felt was bewilderment at her thinking I merited this, and awe, and I reached out and accepted the check. It wasn’t a gift, so I didn’t say, “Thank you.” It was an investment. I looked her in the eye, an eye that saw a writer, and said, “I promise.”

She hugged me. I smelled like her perfume for the rest of the day.

I bought the microcassette recorder over Christmas break, and some miniature blank tapes for it, and some batteries. Everything I needed. And I don’t think I used it to capture a single idea. Ever. Even with it faithfully sitting on the seat in the car beside me. At that point I had just become obsessed with Handel’s Messiah and the small recorder sat next to the full-size cassette player borrowed from my grandmother, which used up those batteries playing my “Messiah Highlights with Vivaldi – Gloria” bargain bin cassette tape. I was singing. I wasn’t in a trance any more. The creativity had stopped flowing. I didn’t have a Dr. Little in front of me each day to keep those gates open.

I dedicated this blog to her. It’s the closest I will ever come to writing a book. Even though I’m twenty years late, to the extent I have been able, I have kept that promise. I’m trying to give a good return on her investment.

Press the tiny “FWD” button ….

Last night, we were digging through a box that P.J. asked me to stick in the back of James’ closet eleven years ago. It was an “I’ll get to that stuff at some point” box with unknown contents. A decade went by and I always had to shove the box out of the way when putting sheets and board games and toys on that shelf in his closet.

Then yesterday, we were moved by the Holy Spirit of Eschewing Clutter and decided to do a clean-out, mainly of the basement and our walk-in closet, which had become more of a squeeze-in closet. It was almost bedtime when I remembered that box and thought, “I should go get that. We can add some stuff to the Goodwill pile.” I brought it downstairs and set it in the kitchen.

Ten years had transformed it into a box mostly full of junk. A coaxial cable coupler, two elderly VOIP boxes, old phones, various wires and objects that have long been surpassed technologically. “Toss the lot,” we both said, and I was about to tip it into the garbage can, since we needed the empty box itself, when something caught my eye and I fished it out of the bottom.

It was the recorder. I thought I had lost it over the course of all the moves during my twenties. But I also knew that I’d never been able to bring myself to discard it, and last night, I held it in both hands, and thought about this blog, and tears welled up. I regarded it with a mixture of knowing how silly it would be to hang on to an object I will never use and a desire to consider it a holy relic and enshrine it.

I asked P.J., “Am I a writer? I’ve only touched a few people with my words. Is there a threshold? How do you know when you’re actually a writer?” She said in a soft voice, “Only you can answer that, but I think you know the answer, love.”

Thank you, Sylvia, for the preserved memory of seeing an office stacked with loved books, for the tears I know you shed when Conroy died, and for investing in the likes of a floundering seventeen-year-old girl whose mind and future you keenly pierced. Thank you for watering the seeds.

I’ve kept the recorder. I wish I’d kept that canceled check and framed it. And I hope, oh I hope, that I’ve kept my promise.

Reading Patricia Lockwood’s article on Jason Brown’s skating nearly made me pack up this blog and declare it retired. Service: Two months. Not eligible for benefits. Reason for leaving: There is somebody out there who writes like that, and I sound like I’m wheezing garbage in comparison. Let’s leave it to the professionals. Conclude exit interview.

P.J. refused to accept the letter of intent and convinced me to keep going.

I didn’t write in my twenties at all, save for odd ramblings about my teacher and the mental fracture she left, always trying to make sense of it. That’s journaling. I wrote a poem in my thirties and it was published, an experience that was both exhilarating and absurd. I almost immediately lost respect for the publication on the grounds that they would publish something I wrote. Most of my writing energy then was discharged into e-mails, and that was an adequate venue for *cue wet hairball sounds* creativity.

I have something against the word creativity. I make a facial expression exactly like the one my daddy made one Saturday morning, when I was a kid. He poured a bowl of Cheerios for himself, then grabbed the salt container instead of the sugar. I think he was still tired and groggy, and I’m not sure what it says about my kid self that I watched with interest and didn’t warn him. He heaped several spoonfuls of salt into the cereal bowl, which was how Cheerios were meant to be eaten, had that been Dixie Crystals and not Morton’s Iodized. Remember scraping grey-white bits of sugar off the bottom of the bowl? He poured in the milk and spooned the first bite. That expression right there. The one you can see him making during his “what the fuck holy shit where is the sink I have to spit this out” moment. That’s creativity for me. “Nurture” falls into the same category. I have these positive words that somewhere along the way I rejected, most likely on the grounds that I deeply believed they belonged to other people, not to me, and resented it.

Creativity is people who sit in studios with pristine birch wood floors and a potter’s wheel and work spinning clay. Creativity is Bob Ross painting, and Kate Campbell sitting up from a dead sleep at 2:00 a.m. with an idea for a song, and grabbing her notebook and pen and flashlight from the bedside table and jotting it all down, capturing it for later. Creativity belongs to the artists and the real writers. They get to wear lagenlook clothing and go to hip local coffee shops that display their paintings or invite them to grace a live music night in a dim-lit corner.

The Great Wall of all inhibitions against writing was Barnes and Noble. I used to measure my personal worth as a fraction. If there were seven billion people in the world, and I was one person, that meant my value as a human being was 1/7,000,000,000, which is limit-approaching-zero for that purpose. And there seemed to be seven billion books in Barnes and Noble. I would walk in and look around at shelf after shelf of things that creative people had to say. Book after book. So many books. All of the books. Books about everything.

These other people, they’d covered it all. Any thoughts I might have ventured had al- ready been said, and said far better than I could say them, because they got published in books. Quod erat demonstratum.

I grew a little older. The fraction-based perception of my own worth fell away as I stopped clinging desperately to the need for any sense of worth. I realized I was seeing it all wrong, as I stared out at the Milky Way from a tucked-away mountain ridge and knew the exquisite freedom of being proven insignificant, and from that vantage point, I went out and gained a sense of security anyway, torpedoes be damned. It brought me a measure of peace that only aging and stars can bring.

I think that’s the main thing that allowed me to start writing. I’m not writing now for the world to see and adjudicate, to elevate and add me to one of those towering shelves in the book store. I’m not writing a book. I’m not writing to be promulgated into fame like Ree Drummond and Jenny Lawson and Allie Brosch. Real writers. Jenny Lawson co uld do a twelve-part series on crunchy peanut butter and it would still leave me jealous and enriched and in love with her, all at once. She does that. It’s her writing.

My grandmother was a writer, too. She had a tiny column called “Millicent and Me” in the local, poorly-circulated newspaper of a small town that held an abandoned textile factory. Millicent was her alter-ego, refined and posh and elegant. She and Millicent would go around together, musing about the town’s history and reporting on goings-on, small festivals and church events, and my grandmother would write about them in the form of a conversation between the two of them. She wrote her columns on what became stacks upon stacks of yellow spiral- bound note pads. She then typed them up and delivered them to the newspaper office in town every Wednesday morning, in person.

I once asked her why she wrote. “I can’t help it. I have to,” she said. “If you’re a writer, you have to write. That’s how you can tell.” She wrote the monthly poem for the Baptist church newsletter. It appeared beside the calendar of birthdays and the Bible study schedule, and above the list of names of those who needed prayer. She wrote them even after the dementia had taken hold and she couldn’t live by herself any more. She lived with my daddy after that and often didn’t know who he was or why she was being given her lunch, but she could still write beautiful poems. My grandmother died a year ago at the age of 95. The preacher and I struck up an awkward conversation after the funeral, the man of God and the lesbian granddaughter, in which he told me that they have a binder in the church library containing every one of those poems she wrote over several decades. They named her the church’s “poet laureate”. That would have meant the world to her. I keep meaning to get by there to pore through that binder and make copies. He said I’m welcome at the church. I think he meant it.

My handwriting is even starting to look like hers.

The real writers. I couldn’t write until I knew I would be writing out into the void, the tree falling in the woods with no one to hear it. This involved enough self-negation to let me be myself, keep me honest. And I am not creative. That’s those other people. The bloggers. The authors. My grandmother. Not me. I write for myself.

Now that I’ve started, I have to. I can’t help it.

The next part annoys me to no end. Once I started writing, another part of me woke and stretched and yawned, and then put on its bunny slippers, grabbed some coffee, and set about manifesting itself as a long-suppressed part of my psyche. I wanted readers. I actually want people to see this and give me feedback. What the hell?

I’m self-effacing. I’m way too mentally ill to put everything on display. And I’ve utterly confused P.J., who is solely responsible for helping me past all of those look-at-all-these-fucking-books and I-have-nothing-to-say defense mechanisms and convinced me that if I want to write, I should write. She wasn’t expecting this any more than I was.

And neither of us was expecting that I would let everything hang out, leave nothing private and sacred. I quickly cultivated the belief that I’m saying things, brazen things, that others might need to hear. Brave and stupid. Things other writers have the sense to hide, like civilized people, like masterful commanders of words.

And yet ….