Why I write

And Why a Substack For Very Little Money?

I can't say I knew I wanted to be a writer as a child, but I can say I was mesmerized by language. And stories. When I was sick in bed, my mother provided pop-up books to entertain me and somehow fever and those raised cardboard cutouts mingled and fascinated. I'd fall asleep and find myself elsewhere, no longer in my bedroom but on a farm among lambs and chickens or sailing on the stormy high seas.

As for books with more text, I didn't learn to read until I was nine because I was ridiculously insecure. I could recite the alphabet but it seemed so easy that I knew it couldn't be the right one, the alphabet that opened doors and which all real people knew. Once a kindly teacher took the time to assure me that my ABC was perfectly all right I started putting words together and after that there was no stopping. My reading was a mix of comics like Beano and Dandy, along with Enid Blyton, Richmal Crompton's Just William series, and Felix Salten, the creator of Bambi and a wonderful novel called Perri about a four-year-old girl who could talk to animals. I was well past four but that didn't stop me from trying to speak with every living creature I encountered.

I read at breakfast and dinner. I read until my mother begged me to go outside and play. I read walking along the street and tripping on the paving stones. I read at night holding a burning oil lamp under the bedsheets so my mother wouldn't know I was still awake. It was a miracle I didn't burn the house down. I read novels about dogs and horses, horror stories, biographies, and adventure books. I started stumbling through Charles Dickens who was a bit hard at that age but so wonderfully alive. Once I found an author I liked at the library I kept going to the very end of the shelf holding his or her oeuvre and then, grieving the loss, started again from the beginning.

Part of the reason for this thirst for books, I'm sure, was that there was no television in my world--in fact, I didn't see one until I was twelve and visiting the home of a classmate and that was not much more than a snow-filled box. Films were available for children only on Saturdays at the cinema and there was no borrowing, repeating, or streaming if you found one you loved.

I discovered poetry when I was given two large maroon compendia, each volume titled Sunday. What drew me to the interiors was the inscription inside the first: "To little Nellie with love from Dada, 1889."

I envied Nellie. My Dada had died when I was four.

So I plunged into these books, which I soon surmised had been put together to entertain Victorian children trapped every week after church in a stuffy house, darkened by heavy velvet curtains. Between homilies about being virtuous, brief lessons about how phrases like "seated below the salt" had developed, and stories about the gracious and royal doings of Queen Victoria, the books provided Wordsworth ("See the kitten on the wall/ Playing with the leaves that fall"), Christina Rossetti's fantastical and hypnotically rhythmic "Goblin Market," and Tennyson's "The Eagle":

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

****

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

I've already told the story about my introduction to Shakespeare in this Substack, but I'll summarize. When I was around nine a teacher introduced our class to Romeo and Juliet's first encounter and told me to read the female part aloud because of my name. She herself took Romeo. I doubt I understood all the words, but the sound of them and the rhythm, not to mention the mystery of first love for a nine year old left me dizzy with pleasure.

I learned my response was anything but universal after class when Freddy, a tough working-class kid, came up to tell me that if he ever found a bust of Shakespeare in his house "I'd smash it" and emphasized the word smash by making a fist of his left hand and driving it hard into his right palm.

I had a bit of a crush on Freddy and so I examined my conscience. Was I an elitist? Pretentious? A horrible little snob? I had always sincerely believed that anyone exposed to great writers, anyone who encountered such greatness in their homes, would feel a response similar to mine. Freddy showed me otherwise.

You couldn't live in England in the 1940s and '50s without being acutely aware of class and, truthfully, as the daughter of a widowed Jewish refugee mother who worked all and every day to keep us afloat (clearly working class) and finding myself nevertheless speaking with the middle-class accent acquired from fellow school students, I never quite knew where I fit. I was always drawn to tough kids and outsiders. And once I reached dating age I hugely preferred East Enders to comfortably conventional middle-class youths. I honestly thought of working-class people as more interesting and in many ways smarter and more empathetic than the monied class. And to some extent I still do. They tend to be more observant and more aware of the world around them.

Monica Dickens, granddaughter of Charles and always an interesting vivid writer--if not her grandfather's equal--seemed drawn to similar interests. Her first book, the one that made her famous, was called One Pair of Hands and described her stint as a maid in wealthy households. She described the blindness and lazy arrogance of the upper class with humor, ridicule, and occasional moments of liking and understanding. There was even more on the topic in Joy and Josephine, the novel that followed her memoir. This was about a baby who'd been snatched up during a fire in a children's home by a working-class woman who longed for a child. There had been two babies in the room where this one lay and one was the daughter of an aristocratic family, and had been named Joy. No one, however, could say which infant was which. The working-class family lengthened her name to Josephine which they thought was a higher class appellation, and she spent her childhood and much of her teens in a musty little flat above the dingy shop they owned on Portobello Road.

A cheeky little bugger, Josephine defied her parents and spent time making mischief with the grubby neighborhood boys. Until her biological family found and came to claim her, changing her name to Joy. Perhaps unexpectedly, the upper class tended to eschew the multiple syllables that working people attached to words so if Josephine's first parents said she suffered "migraines," her new family translated the word to plain and simple "headaches." Dickens's acute powers of observation make for a fascinating story as Josephine transmutes to Joy.

****

Perhaps part of me did want to become a writer when I was very young. I remember fragments of plot floating through my mind. One was something about seeing the man sitting opposite me on the bus changing shape whenever I looked at him. What shapes? Who was he and what would he become?

But it seemed clear that I could never win this sacred title. I just could not be good enough. And besides, by the time I reached my teens D.H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer were assuring the world that no one lacking a penis could possibly produce writing of value. I imagined the literary world as a mountain with the greatest of writers at the summit and the rest forming rings along the way down. At the very bottom of this mountain were worshippers laying down flowers--and it was among them that I could find my place.

I won't bore you with the following years when I worked as a journalist and taught writing at the University of Colorado. I knew I was competent enough but remained deeply insecure even when wonderful nuggets of encouragement came as when, in my forties, I took a workshop with Margaret Atwood and, having read a couple of my stories, she said, "You write well and you write about things that matter." And then humorously waving me away she added, "Go forth and write."

I should have ridden that pony to confidence and recognition, but I still couldn't quite believe what I'd heard.

Why a Substack?

One of the things Margaret Atwood stressed in class was that what matters for writers is the work itself rather than the results of that work. It took me well into old age to fully realize how right she was, to gain the confidence you need to write and keep writing, send the work out, and accept rejections as well as the occasional acceptance or even award. I've also finally come to fully understand that when I don't write, something inside me dies. And that I have a right to pursue, delve into, and share whatever level of understanding and talent I may have, no matter how big those male penises.

Hence, the Substack.

This well-designed app that allows the building of a writer's world creates a place where you're entirely free, where you're not constantly trying to explain the use of metaphor to groups of students, sorting out the genuine talents from the kids who have never read for pleasure and can't produce an assigned essay without demanding a rubric. Or dealing with deadlines and editors who may or may not share your view of what to communicate and how to communicate it--even when you have the luck of smart and meticulous ones.

Many Substack writers stick to one theme. They post political analysis, personal confession, recipes, articles on aging and self-care, humorous anecdotes. Much of their work is interesting. But I want to write about all those things from politics to apple strudel, death to love, kindness to violence, and the meaning of evil.

Nurturing your Substack is hard work but doing it you often feel you've finally passed through a confining space and for the first time as a writer are breathing the clean, beautiful air.

Age also changes consciousness. No longer visiting farms or sailing the seas, I find myself going back in time, re-living events, and finding some bits and pieces of memory that make sense and click into place, some that just inexplicably float in, and some that make no sense at all. At the core of the writing is passion. Putting together the puzzle of your own life but also understanding better how that life has been shaped by culture, place, and time.

The point is you're writing. You're communicating. There are readers who make up a kind of community, some who share their thoughts and ideas, some who want to argue or complain, some thanking you for expressing things they themselves have experienced but hadn't yet put into words.

I'm sure most readers have noticed there's no paywall; if a post is repeated on social media or you've found the Substack on Google, you can pass over the subscription request and just go straight to the text.

About subscriptions and money. Yes, I love having subscribers, so many of them gifted writers, thinkers, observers, and artists themselves. And I'm particularly grateful to those who are willing to pay. I know how easy it is to find yourself spending far too much on even small amounts for favored news and streaming sources, podcasts, politicians and political groups you want to support, and that for many of us worries about our budgets are intensifying as the government threatens the benefits people rely on from social security and medical care to the grants that keep scientists, educators, and artists at their work.

I am deeply grateful to all my subscribers, whether they pay or not. Though for everyone who does pay there is a dance around the study and a little hymn of gratitude. (Just imagine it. I'd post a video if it weren't for the stiff knees.)

As for those sneering male writers of the 1950s: You can put that thing away now.