Why I Write
Today’s “Letter from the Lauffice” is brought to you by our wonderful intern, Cecilia Landis. She explores her long history with writing and how it helped her navigate tragedy and loss. Thanks so much for sharing this with us today, Cecilia!
I grew up in a house where the books outnumbered the DVDs we owned, and the ones that we did have were made exclusively for children. I joke that the only movie I watched as a kid was Disney’s classic ‘Cinderella’. I owned the dress and I could sing all of the songs (a talent which I rarely spared my mother from). I had a wand like the Fairy Godmother, fashioned out of Chinese plastic and Disney magic.
My favorite Cinderella toy, however, was this tin box with magnets. Cinderella was printed on the front and the magnets were of the animals, kitchen supplies, and other odd items seen in the film. It was my favorite toy because every night before I went to bed, my father would sit down next to me and tell a story with the tin and magnets. There were many different variations on the classic story that he told, but every one of them would somehow end with Lucifer the cat spilling milk all down the front of Cinderella’s dress. It was with these nightly bedtime stories that my father managed to inadvertently teach me the art of story-telling.
My father’s bedtime stories aren’t the only reason I love to write. I think it’s part of the reason but definitely not all of it. Another storyteller I had in my life was my grandmother. She loved to retell the same stories over and over again about how she grew up with her Ukrainian grandmother in the mining town of Shamokin, Pennsylvania. She told us about how she slept in the same bed as her grandmother until she was thirteen and how for Easter they always bought a big butter lamb because it was a Ukrainian Catholic tradition. She told us how her father came home every night from the coal mines covered in soot and ash. And she loved to remind us always to listen to her because the one time she hadn’t listened to her grandmother, she ended up with a broken arm (to clarify: this was no fault of her grandmother’s). Listening to her stories, I could almost hear my Great-Great-Grandmother snoring in her Ukrainian accent; I could taste the butter lamb; I could see her father stomping through the door; and I could feel the pain in her arm when she jumped the fence. It was all a beautiful life for her, even when it wasn’t.
What these two storytellers had in common was the joy that they gained from telling their stories. My father’s eyes would glisten in the dim lamplight of my room as he brought the bowl of milk in between Cinderella and the cat, in the same way that my grandmother would get a thousand-yard stare every time she talked about the people and places she used to love.
I think that’s why I love to write: writing takes me away to a place entirely different from the one I’m in now. No longer do I have to think about where I am, but I can now think about everywhere I’m not. I find my joy in the escape. A writer is like the best kind of escape artist there is. A writer can get out of wherever they are whether the door is locked or not.
When I was about six years old, my younger brother Michael was diagnosed with cancer. That was a hard thing to think about. It was something that followed me everywhere. I didn’t have to be in the hospital room with him to know that his next breath might be his last. In the times that weren’t spent thinking about what was going on around me, though, I was writing. Writing became my escape, almost literally. I travelled to the places I wanted to go in my head. If I saw a picture in a book that I liked, I wrote about what I would do there. If the lady who wore funny hats to church wore a funnier one, I would write about that. I found a new way to look at my world, a way that didn’t involve all of the pain that had been so quickly sown throughout it. Then, when Michael passed away and everything became even more painful, I was still able to sit down with a pencil in my hand and a thought in my head that could take me as far away from where I was as I could get. My joy was found in the escape.
Thankfully, not every writer has something awful from which they need to escape. Some of us do it just for the art. Some of us use it just to add more spice to our lives. Some of us got started in the mid-90’s and can’t seem to stop. But there is still something that fascinates us about the unexplored world, even if it’s not by our own need to go there. I would encourage discouraged writers to look at it through this lens: remember why you love to write; remember why it gives you joy. It is when we remember that, I believe, that we will find a fresh love for writing once more.
Cecilia
