DAY DREAMS/                                                                                                                                                   There were two trees I loved as a child. They lived less than an acre apart, but never met. This made me sad, as I was certain they would get along if the chance ever came. I tried making introductions, but whenever I broached the subject they were too busy doing secretive tree things that I did not understand.

The Front Yard Tree thrived on the imaginations of little girls. The cool, dappled darkness cast by her  limbs was the perfect setting for pretend-time and play-acting. She encouraged me to be Princess Leia and Jeannie, and was always welcoming to my various faery incarnations. She was too tall to climb, and never liked it when I claimed I was Peter Pan or Robin Hood. She towered high above the lawn and, though she was witness to hundreds of my fervent only-child fantasies, she was deeply rooted in the here-and-now. There was only that day, and perhaps the one before, but no mysterious future time when I would be a grown-up. I babbled in faery talk, furiously whipped my pony-tail above folded arms, and ran circles in a white robe whilst my carefully pinned buns unraveled. She listened, and watched.

The Back Yard Tree was the guardian of my dreams. She was gnarly and dark, yet managed to grow enough red, ripe fruit every summer to cover the ground like a spreading blood stain. She was rent down the middle by two malformed, low-hanging branches that were perfect for climbing and reclining on as long as I dared. This was the stage where I read aloud books to an audience of rotting, stinking apples. They enjoyed it so much that, since my hostess did not seem to mind, I soon turned to telling them my own impromptu stories. Brief stories became sagas that took weeks to tell. I became a writer during those years, though I did not know it at the time. That epiphany did not come until I was seven, and when it happened I instinctively knew that I owed something to The Back Yard Tree. With her tacit encouragement, my play-time dreams turned to the future; a future where I could be exactly what I wished, even if that something was as strange as a girl sitting around making up stories. Suddenly, under her watch, I was no longer limited to the here-and-now, no matter how fantastical it was. I didn’t have to pretend I was someone else (unless I really wanted to), even if that someone else had glorious hair or gossamer wings or possessed the remarkable ability to shrink herself small enough to fit into a pretty bottle.

NIGHT PARADES/

Whenever I think about The Back Yard Tree, I have a strange desire to write a travel essay or story. One containing a lot of natural elements, set close-to-home, autobiographical, maybe with a recipe or two. I’m not quite sure why, but it is inescapable. Urgent. That tree still speaks to me after all of this time, seventeen years after my grandparents sold the property and moved down the road to a larger house with a smaller yard. If you think about it, you’ll realize that writers are always being spoken to, all the time: by people, places, thoughts, memories, conversations, snippets of this and glimpses of that. Like a medium surrounded by nothing but dead people who refuse to move on to whatever in the hell it is they are supposed to move on to, we cannot escape these whisperings. It’s us against two worlds-the real and the imagined- that are begging to be recorded, suspended in time as shimmering as amber and as inviolate. To be unbreakable. Remembered.

That is a huge burden to carry, and one that we all have to face time and time and time again. It loops past us at rapid speed on a conveyor belt that will not stop. (Even if you never write another word, it isn’t going anywhere.) What to write. When to write. How to write it well. What not to write. What to re-write. What to keep. What to throw away. Which whispering, of the thousands trying to get your attention at any given time, needs addressed now, today? Which one is the most insistent, the most desperate?

What if, muse forbid, there are different genres competing for your attention? Not just the ones you are familiar with, that give you comfort…What about forms that, out of nowhere, throw themselves at your feet, in your face, demanding that you try them? Like that fuzzy travel article/time-travel autobiography/food essay that won’t leave me alone? I don’t write about those things. Never have. What the hell, screams my intellect! No, no, no. Impossible. Except. Except that I am going to try to make something of that hazy idea. Also, the one that wants me to write a play for the first time since the 10th grade. Why not?

I am a writer. I think about writing, dream of writing, form my identity around writing. I am woken from the dark depths of sleep to write. I even write about writing, writers, words. If I am a writer, I am ten writers, fifty, a thousand; I am every writer who has ever lived, ever written. So are you. I am flesh, bone, breath, water, muscle, cell; every writer I am or hope to become lives inside this shell. It is the same for you. With every nod of the head or blink of an eye, with every thought, every sight, I see a capability waiting to become a possibility. Our bodies will be exhausted before our writers’ imaginations will. It goes on like this, until everything is drained; when everything is drained, new possibilities are born out of necessity: the necessity to write, to live by words, through words, for words. Until all that is left is words. This writing life, as you know, or suspect, is a hard-assed thing. It smothers, even as it cocoons; it comforts, even as it chills your soul. It is demanding, vain, and egotistical. It is also the best thing in the world for those who cannot help themselves. If you are called to write, why limit yourself to the known? The safe? Although it has long been claimed that writers write, no one ever said that you have to write the same thing all the time.

If the writing life is as all encompassing as I believe it is, there is ample room to write what you want, how you want, when you want. Trust yourself, and try everything that whispers your name. Once you call yourself a writer, you’ll never be free to go back to how it was before, anyway. You are trapped for life.