I was thrilled to be invited by Connie Berg to co-present
a “Get Started Writing” workshop for members of the public at the
Tea Tree Gully Library. The aim of this two-hour
workshop was to introduce participants to writing by “doing”, and give them
some tools and hopefully some inspiration to continue on with it.
Ironically, I was nominated to run the section on poetry,
for which I have great appreciation but little compositional skill. I had enormous fun putting together a haiku
worksheet, and a shared poetry-writing exercise, which was enjoyed with amazing
and occasionally hilarious results. Participants
then wrote some of their own fiction, and had the opportunity to share their
work with a supportive audience. Anyone
who’s engaged with a good group of writers knows how enormously rewarding and
encouraging this can be.
But life is a wonderful and mysterious thing, and the
workshop held a surprise for me.
I was surprised at the late arrival of lady who had both
the face and the surname of my Grade 3 teacher, Mrs R. Could it be my most fondly remembered
teacher? She had been flaming-haired and
vivacious, passionate about imagination, about learning. I remember, as the quiet, strange girl that I
was, that this was the teacher who showed me that if you put in extra effort,
you can produce something good. Something
beautiful. Something that you can be
proud of. Even though I spent only
two-thirds of the year in her classroom, it was a pivotal time in my learning. She encouraged my reading, but even more
importantly, she switched me on to writing, neatly and well.
I remember the shining feeling of pride seeing two gold
stars and a smiley stamp on what must
have been one of my very first works of imaginative fiction. I clung to that feeling when I was suddenly uprooted
to a distant, hot land. I changed
schools five more times in the next five years, but the memory of her and what
she had taught me kept me engaged with learning, even in desolate emotional
terrain. I had wondered since whether I might ever meet her again, and hoped one day to thank her.
And yes, thirty years later, in this community writing
workshop, it was indeed Mrs R. She remembered
the sad, quiet girl I had been at age 7.
When the class ended, she handed me an acrostic poem she had written for
me. This beautiful, expressive,
expansive teacher – who’d had no idea of the impact she’d had on my life - had
seen a spark inside a quiet child and coaxed it to a flame. She was rewarded all these years later by
seeing that girl transformed, and
that flame now blazing as passion for writing and the joy of sharing it with
others.
The significance of this moment was not lost on me. It seems like
more than just coincidence that
I reconnected with the teacher who taught me to want to write well, in that
same space – the sphere of writing, of sharing learning, of getting started on the
thing that calls you. It affirmed in
both of us the power of sharing what you’re passionate about, in a moment of
unexpected, exquisite
denouement.
So, the moral to this story, if there is one, is to get started. Get started writing. Or painting.
Or singing. Or whatever it is that lights you up, get
started doing that. Do it often, and
share the joy that it brings you. It
creates a space, a magical chink through which all sorts of unimagined rewards
can enter your life.
What are you waiting for?
