Accompanying Songs:
• Life According To Raechel by Madison Cunningham
• 6 Studies in English Folksong, No.4 by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gerald Penegrine, and Antony Ingham
When you’re a kid, it feels like you can do anything.
I grew up in a suburb southwest of Fort Worth, Texas called Benbrook, home to a bajillion forests, parks and trails, divine sunsets and open skies, horse stables and ranch homes, and more fast food restaurants than you can count on five hands. Along with other regrettable incidents, Benbrook has been in the national spotlight a good few times, most notably for a 91-0 loss in a high school football game during my junior year, which, for the time being, I’ll charitably spare you the details of. (If you’re extra curious, you’re a Google search away—but I digress.)
Daydreams of youth in Benbrook consist of running barefoot on fresh grass, playing wall ball and pickup basketball with my best friends, and racing each other at field days thrown on the last day of school. Benbrook was the metallic crack of baseball bats and the squeaking of bikes and swingsets. Spelling bees, after-school programs, and sock hops. The unbeatable joy of a competitive game of outdoor hide-and-seek stretching long into a blue summer night.
As a kid, I was loved, nurtured, and fortunate enough to feel as if the world was wide open. How blessed a child can be. I loved growing up in Benbrook.
Kids have the luxury of living purely in the present, fully unaware that their life trajectories are as malleable as the Play-Doh they sculpted into castles as toddlers. Yet grown-ups have the power to bring kids a glimpse into all the possibilities that await them. Grown-ups can give a kid a baseball glove, a guitar, or a camera and thus offer them an invitation into a future. To give a kid the necessary love and encouragement afterwards is to offer them the confidence into a life.
Growing up, my Grandma always told me I was a writer. Within a day of getting home from summer vacations, she would ring the family home phone, ask my dad to put me on the line, and commission me to write her a story summing up every activity as best as I could remember.
Truthfully, I used to think it was a dreadful exercise. I equated writing to school assignments where writing was only ever a means to a passing grade, and what child enjoys doing anything for a grade? Finally home for the rest of the summer, young Michael now has to exert his precious little brainpower for another assignment, untethered to a rubric or a grade—and all this for what?
“Oh darling, I just loved it!” she would tell me over the phone the following week.
I could have written anything. I could have smashed my hands on the keyboard, printed out nonsense, written my name on it, and mailed it to her. If I were clever, I could have employed an artificial intelligence bot or some other poor kid to write my story for me and it could make no sense at all, and she would call me and tell me, “Oh darling, I just loved it! I would love if you would write me another story sometime soon,” and I would dread hearing that, and begin to dread writing the next one already. She was relentlessly encouraging.
Only now can I fully appreciate those early nudges. My Grandma never called me a witty writer, or an articulate writer, or any other kind of writer. She wouldn’t dare assign an adjective to accompany the vocation. It was no contest, and there was no measuring stick. No expectations to exceed. In her eyes, her grandson was my grandson, the writer, and putting pen to paper was just in his DNA. He would blossom in his own time.
These days, I regularly go through writing droughts where I find it much easier to consume the works of others and plant myself in bewilderment at their perfect arrangements of words. See: John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda, and many others I hail as heroes.
Unfettered creative genius is a spectacle that amazes, disarms, and paralyzes an audience all at once. Yet, it has been far too long in my life without sitting down to write good and honest words, reorienting myself from consumer to architect. I’ll entertain a thoughtfully-written Instagram caption or a blog post here and there; but to sit quiet with my thoughts, to witness their formation and hear the whispers of their ethos, to mold them with my own hands into full-grown ideas, to reintroduce my head to my heart—it has been far too long.
“You really should write more,” my Grandma told me a few months back. I write this at 25, a decade and a half following those early years spent soaking up all that encouragement.
Only now am I beginning to connect the dots and identify the seeds planted in those early years where identity begins to take shape; to believe in my bones that writing feels like home.
~
When I was in sixth grade, I began writing a fan fiction story in English class based on an online PC game I played called Flyff.
Flyff (short for Fly For Fun) was a fantasy MMORPG first developed and released in Korea in 2004, then released in North America in 2005. The game is called Fly For Fun because once you ascend to level 20, your character is able to buy a magical broom and soar through the skies, allowing for air combat and lightning-fast travel. Flying was one of Flyff’s key selling points and was very much for fun.
I brought a red folder full of blank notebook paper to class and went to town on it during lessons. My main character was a low-level vagrant and aspiring magician with zero spells or abilities, who later meets the main supporting character, a higher-leveled girl equipped with buffs and healing abilities. They met, had conversations full of exposition and poor attempts at flirting, went on adventures where he would fight monsters and she would heal him, leveled up side by side, split through the clouds on a magical broom together, and then fell in love. Honest to God, I have no idea how I passed that class.
Our English teacher, Mrs. Hodges, was cold, stern, and imposing. She commanded our respect and in return, we fearfully offered it. I’m not certain why I felt comfortable blowing off her lessons to write my fantasy epic. Over our time together, her hard shell gradually melted off and she softened up towards us with great affection. She pretended not to notice my red folder-induced absentmindedness. Maybe she was just glad I was writing anything.
The alternate hypothesis I like to consider is that she thought my dancing was funny and somehow in that she grew fond of me. I liked seeing her laugh away her uncompromising exterior each time I cut a rug in class. She called me Happy Feet.
I summoned about a full chapter every two weeks and after finishing my first chapter, I passed the red folder down my row of desks to my friend Bryan, who also loved fantasy, stick figure comics, and video games. He asked what I was writing. Thirty minutes later after reading it in the middle of a lesson, the red folder boomeranged back down our row of desks.
“Bro, that was awesome,” Bryan told me after class. To this day, I wonder if he had any reference point for saying that.
Awesome how? I might have thought. Did he really follow whatever I just wrote in that?
Given there were maybe a few thousand people in the world playing this game, this had to be the first Flyff fan fiction he had ever read, if there miraculously happened to be Flyff fan fiction found anywhere at all outside of Leonard Sixth Grade Center.
He followed up his endorsement with a series of questions about what certain game terms meant, where the characters were from, and what would happen later in the story.
“I don’t know bro,” I said. I was flying by the seat of my jean shorts in pure sixth-grade fashion.
But is this not what all writing is, leading with the next best step? Taking your sixth-grade audience on a field trip through the mind’s eye to the next best destination your imagination can dream up?
Yet these questions were the exact questions I had my head buried too deep to consider asking myself.
You’re right Bryan—what is an Aibatt, or a Nyangnyang, or a Mushpang? What is Flaris? Why did they immediately fall in love? I had pondered.
I can confess that my characters fell in love immediately because I was writing this in sixth grade. Unfortunately, I was projecting.
Bryan’s questions became my questions to answer. Great writing requires confronting your blind spots, to answer the questions that you have a low likelihood of thinking to ask. In the chapters to follow, I adapted my writing to button up confusion about the world, story and characters of this niche anime game that only I had played.
I held the key.
Within the next few weeks, my red folder gained unwarranted attention across my row of desks. Someone would ask to read it after Bryan and I would nervously say yes. Then another, then another. They would finish the first chapter and ask the same questions Bryan asked. I would tell them to continue reading.
Before I knew it, the whole class was reading my Flyff story, discussing it with each other inside and outside of class. Friends would approach me in passing period and ask me what would happen next.
“I don’t know bro,” I told them honestly.
Across the school year, my red folder grew heavier with ink and thicker with added notebook pages. I wrote about 70 pages in total, and the story still lives in my closet.
That red folder marks the first words that I trusted with readers other than my teachers and my sweet Grandma. To receive investment from peers for this curious little story derived from a hyper-niche game, written purely based on instinct and the love for writing itself, was to feel accepted. It was to feel like words carried weight.
Interest and attention paid to one’s art is akin to love.
~
My sweet Grandma passed last Saturday.
The prior week, she was bedridden in hospice with pancreatic cancer. She was very weak. We’d receive the occasional “yes”, “good”, and “mmhm” in response to our questions, but scarcely much else. It took considerable energy for her to speak.
Last month, I learned that she assembled a scrapbook for me, chock-full of dates, printed photos, and letters written to me over the years.
Her first letter to me was written on April 18, 1997, three days after I was born: “You are so new and precious. I love to hold you on my shoulder, with my chin touching your head - so soft.”
I have to believe that the reason she propelled my writing early on is because she saw a glistening, undeniable piece of herself in me. I think that she wanted me to take hold of it early because it was in my DNA, just as it is in hers. We were bound from day one.
Along with writing, Grandma cheered on my musical journey as I began playing guitar. When she’d visit us for Christmas, she always found time to sit on my bed and ask me to play for her. I’d play the best I could.
In hospice, before it was especially strenuous for her to speak, she asked if I would bring my guitar to play for her one afternoon.
“And can you record it on my phone, darling? So I can listen back later?” she gently requested. I nodded without question.
Playing a few cowboy chords next to her lying in bed was one of our last moments together. Old country music was her favorite. I played the best I could.
A few months later, days before passing, I visited her with family.
“Hi Grandma, it’s me,” I said, clasping her hand. Her hand gripped mine as tight as she could, her eyes closed. We sat in silence for a moment.
“Grandma, I had no idea you began a scrapbook for me so soon after I was born. I just had no idea.”
She gave the sunniest grin.
“Thank you for making that.”
We had only spoke on the phone a few weeks prior. A month can be the difference between winter and spring, peace and war, life and death. Here is someone who wrote hundreds of letters to her grandson over two decades, now hardly able to offer a word to him only a month later. My heart broke.
We shared silence again, until she drew the strength to ask me a question.
“What have you been doing lately?”
This question seemed a miracle.
“Remember those stories you would ask me to write you after vacations?” I asked her.
“I’m writing more stories,” I said.
And the sun in her smile rose again.
There are very few people within two generations’ length away that I can say have truly loved, understood, and noticed me for me, and she was up there among the very best. I love her much, and I will miss her dearly.
~
Writing can be very scary to me. There are many illusions at play that require dismantling before it feels possible to commit anything to paper.
There is the illusion that any sentence I jot down is not only rubbish, but immediately available to the critiques of the public before I have the chance to agonize over it; the illusion that the stories I want to tell aren’t as vital or meaningful as somebody else’s stories; the illusion that there is a greater chance I’ll wrestle with a blank page for the afternoon than extract colorful sentence after colorful sentence.
Lucky for me and for anybody who writes, the acknowledgment of these illusions is the beginning of our best writing. Even luckier for us, it takes only a few times overcoming these illusions to earn the muscle memory of picking up the pen again. Writing is the act of driving through a dark, cold mist into the sunny pasture that awaits.
On writing, Amos Oz once noted, “Now I think of myself as a shopkeeper: it is my job to open up in the morning, sit, and wait for customers. If I get some, it is a blessed morning, if not, well, I’m still doing my job.”
I consider myself beyond lucky to have friends that see me on Saturday and Sunday evenings and ask, “Did you write today?”
“Yeah, I did!” I’ll say. Every Saturday and Sunday afternoon I possibly can.
For those friends familiar with the Amos Oz quote that I’d have surely referenced in earlier conversations about my afternoon ritual, they’ll ask, “Any customers show?” and I’ll either say, “Yes, many!” or “None at all!” or “A few! But they were sure difficult.”
And then they’ll ask, “What did they order?” and I’ll say, “The most challenging specialty latte,” and they’ll ask, “Well, did they tip?” and our extended metaphor will go on and on.
If nothing else, implementing a consistent weekend afternoon writing ritual has taught me one thing: it is far easier to catch lightning in a bottle when you carve out the time and space for the trying to catch it. By way of unlocking the doors, stocking the shelves, and showing up, I am still doing my job.
The fellow from Barnes & Noble who sold me my leather journal four years ago glanced down at it, scanned the barcode, and asked, “Gonna write the next great American novel?”
“No, probably not,” I wrote onto my fresh ivory pages later that day, in response to him and to myself in my first journal entry. “But it may help these old, dusty writing gears I had inside of me as a kid start to turn again. I miss that.”
As Mary Oliver famously stated, “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
I had a dream not long ago that I was standing next to a dear friend, holding a book and flipping through its pages. It was my book. My friend glanced over my shoulder, skimming the pages as I flipped through them, and told me, “Wow, Michael, this is just incredible.”
Surely this was my subconscious projecting my aspiration to write a real, tangible book someday, a book that happens to be “just incredible.” Nonetheless, I take this dream as a welcome sign, an invitation into the reality where this book does exist.
I hold on to the sense that writing is in my nature. All I’ve wanted in every season of this life is to express myself fully, as it was written in the stars and made certain by my sweet Grandma many years ago.
I am her grandson, the writer. This book is my honest effort to believe it and act on it.