Tag: fiction

I Owe Someone a Note

I’m listening to The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. I’m only partway through, so don’t worry. This isn’t a review, and there will be no spoilers.

One sentence made me stop and hit rewind.

“He was finding confidence behind the veil of ink on the page.”

That’s a beautiful line. It also made me realize how much of my life I’ve spent communicating through the written word.

One summer in high school, I came home from overnight camp corresponding with about fifteen girls. Long-distance phone calls weren’t an option. Fifteen nightly phone calls would have bankrupted my parents.

To keep eall the letters straight, I created a chart on a piece of cardboard. Down the left side were the girls’ names. Across the top were columns for the date each letter arrived and the date I mailed my reply. My personal correspondence log. Looking back, it may have been a little obsessive. At the time, it felt perfectly reasonable.

The cardboard disappeared years ago, which is probably for the best. Otherwise, one of my grandchildren might someday uncover it and conclude that Baba had been far more popular in high school than he actually was.

Letter writing eventually gave way to pathology reports, emails, newsletters, and blog posts. The audience has changed. The pleasure hasn’t. I still enjoy staring at a blank screen or a piece of paper, chasing an idea around until it finally behaves.

A few months ago, I found myself buying a box of correspondence cards on Amazon. Not birthday cards. Not sympathy cards. Just simple white correspondence cards with a gray border for thank-you notes and the occasional handwritten letter. The kind of stationery that practically insists you mind your manners.

In this era of texts, emails, Facebook posts, and emojis, buying stationery felt almost rebellious. But the cards are on my desk now, and every so often one finds its way into an envelope.

It turns out I never stopped being a correspondent. So excuse me, I owe someone a note.

From Pixels To Print: A Revelation

My writing is ethereal. I don’t mean heavenly, I mean that instead of existing in reality, it exists on laptops and flat-screen monitors, Google phones and iPads. Pixels on screens bringing my words to you. So it has been, and so it continues to be.

Until now. Responding to some requests, I have emailed the text of my (as of yet unproduced) play to friends and relatives. I send the copies as PDFs, with the assumption that those kind enough to read the play will peruse it on whatever screen is at the nearest at whatever time is convenient.

But one friend pushed that little print icon on her screen (intentionally, I hope) and was soon swamped by 90 pages of my words, or rather the words of the half-dozen characters in my prison-life drama. She read and enjoyed and told me so.

I wasn’t home when she brought the pages to our house yesterday, so she left them with a request that I sign the cover page and return it to her. And I plan to do that. But not until I have spent time enjoying the pleasure of seeing my work in print.

I know I could have printed a copy at any time, just as I could have printed out any of my blogs. But I never have. I never saw the need to. But now seeing my work in print–even in this informal copy–changes my outlook on the play and on myself. It compares to when I was introduced to someone in the neighborhood and she said “I know your name, you’re the writer.”

If I can get this far I can go further. It may be with the current play, it may be with something else that I choose to write, or publish, or produce. I’ve got lots of time ahead of me, and a keyboard that calls to me.

And this time around, I may use the printer, too!

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