Eight years ago, I found myself sitting at a lonely desk about an hour away from the busy streets of Philadelphia. My family and I had moved across the country to a house that overlooked a hay farm. It’s a place where horses, farmers, and mushroom growers live, not a native Californian like me. I didn’t know a soul. Our nearest neighbor worked from home like I did, but he wasn’t exactly the warm and fuzzy type. When I asked if I could list him as the ‘emergency contact’ for my children's new school, he said, “Uh, I guess so, but for how long?”
My husband was at his new job, a promising position his company offered him 20 minutes away, and our kids were busy at their new elementary school, but there I sat staring out the window. I was irritated and distracted by the flickering screen on my computer, reminding me that I hadn’t written anything. I couldn’t focus. I was landlocked and lost in rural Pennsylvania.
Although my family life blog was gaining readership, and a few of my stories had been picked up by a syndicated radio show on NPR, I felt myself slipping away. I was thousands of miles from close friends but didn’t want to burden them with my complaints. Additionally, I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother and the barely-there life she had in the assisted living facility she was tethered to in California. There was nothing I could do about her situation; my older sisters held the keys to her care, and I had no say in it. I didn’t agree with their decisions about what was “best” for our mother, or their version of elder care in general. They’d succeeded in blocking any opportunity for my mom to try out living with me and my family in California. That’s why, when my husband was offered a job that included a relocation package, I told him to take it. I knew I’d never change my sisters’ minds, and my mother’s mind was too clouded and easily influenced, her body too weak, to advocate for herself, so I left California and tried to make a new life for myself and my own family.
I sat alone in front of my computer each day, thinking of my mom’s failing health and impending death, and wondered where my writing was going. Yes, I’d authored a blog about the challenges of parenting babies and small children in my 40s, but so did thousands of other moms. Besides, I thought, who cares what I have to say? My sisters certainly didn’t.
I’d toyed with the idea of writing more serious essays or editorials, a memoir even, maybe a novel, but I was still trudging through the muck of self-doubt that grew deeper and thicker in my mind.
You’re not even a ‘real’ writer, a voice said. But it wasn’t my voice, it was the voice of a co-worker, someone I’d once considered a good friend, who’d snickered when I gave her a business card I had made with my blog’s name on it: didaink. “Maybe you should pass these out when you’re ‘real’ writer,” she said.
Soon after, I met a real writer, a New Yorker, who was born and raised in Arkansas – Stacy Pershall. Stacy and I became Facebook friends after I bought her memoir at Barnes & Noble. She’d commented or ‘liked’ a post and that post somehow appeared on my Facebook news feed; it had a photo of a woman giving her 90-year-old mother a bubble bath. This picture of a daughter helping her elderly mom enjoy a bath, in the home she’d lived in for 60 years, made my body light up, down, up and down, and up again, until I burst into tears. Two women, mother and daughter, under the spray of bubbles, white foam stuck to their long elegant noses, their faces filled with laughter. Who was this person, doing for her mother what I longed to do for mine? Crescent Dragonwagon, that’s who.
From there on out, I paid attention not only to her name but what she had to say and write about elder care, food, books, and writing. As I read through her public Facebook page, I learned that she was a poet, a novelist, a cookbook author and children’s book author, and a caregiver to her mother Charlotte Zolotow. She was also a writing teacher who was offering, for the first time, an on-line version of her Fearless Writing workshop from her home in Vermont. I could actually participate in her workshop from my lonely desk in Pennsylvania, and I couldn’t wait to sign-up.
To be clear, her workshop Fearless Writing isn’t about being “fearless” about writing; it’s about understanding how to fear it less as you do the work; it’s about accepting that the creative process is full of uncertainty and fear, and it’s also loaded with discovery and meaning. By learning how to practice your daily writing, one eventually learns to trust what unfolds as one's writing takes shape, evolves, and finally moves forward. Crescent’s Fearless Writing workshop completely changed my writing life. Her down-to-earth, unpretentious teaching style put me at ease and taught me how to value my voice as a writer, how to practice my work, and honor it.
Today, my work can be found in the Washington Post, Microsoft News, Yahoo! Lifestyle, and various other digital and print publications. And I now edit and coach other writers who have difficult true stories to share. I feature their work in the pages of Braving Veracity, an anthology series I sponsor, and a publication where all royalties go to the women writers I work with in the Brandywine Valley of Pennsylvania.
Without Crescent’s Fearless Writing workshops, her guidance and mentorship, I would not have grown as a writer and a person; I'd still be staring out the window at haystacks, my writing still stuck in the muck of self-doubt.
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