In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Gail Hosking who shares on the need to pay attention and on writing to remember.
When you grow up surrounded by the Cold War in Europe behind the so-called Iron Curtain, and you live among American soldiers trying to protect you from the next war, and the remnants of Dachau with its ghastly photographs are only an hour away and you are a Girl Scout who promises to make the world a better place, then you begin to pay attention to what is around you. You keep a diary. You spend hours with imaginative paper doll play. You write letters to pen pals. You listen to your teachers who tell you about the universe far from your small apartment on an American Army base in the Alps.
When the world around you speaks another language and you don’t understand all of it, you pay close attention to what people do. You stare a lot and bring your attention to everything going on around you. You watch your father lean his chair back with his arms behind his head to tell war stories you will never understand. When there is nothing else for young girls on an army base to do except the base library, you read a lot of books and get caught up in the world further away, the one with the likes of Nancy Drew and Clara Barton and the Vermont Mountain Boys. When you are a curious child, you ask a lot of questions, desperate for answers.
When you are isolated and lonely on your grandfather’s farm in southern Illinois while your father is away at war again, you write more letters and begin to feel the earth’s vibrations. You notice the suffering everywhere. You carry it with you.
If you are someone whose thoughts connect up with other thoughts floating by in the universe, you must seek somewhere to put them. You feel you need to tell others of those connections. In your thirties you take a memoir class for the heck of it and then an essay course, then find yourself sinking into that world of words so comfortably, so at home that you wonder why it took you this long to find that world.
When you arrive close to the age your father was when he was killed at war, you suddenly want to know more about that war and about your father. You go in search of the photographs and letters he left behind. You do your best to recreate a relationship with a man who died while you are still in high school. You go to the warzone and take notes. You are determined to put it into words even when an editor tells you that Viet Nam is passé. You know it’s not because you have spoken with the aging soldiers, you have read the books, and you carry that war in your body.
When you finally make it to graduate school for creative writing, you sit with Robert Bly at breakfast who says he writes a poem every morning before he gets out of bed, and you are so taken with that thought, so glad to hear of another writer’s obsessions, that you begin to ignore your husband saying that writing poetry is a hobby. You want to spend the rest of your life with a pen.
When you read Stephen Dunn’s poem Emptiness, you know what he means about desire or dreams, how they can’t be filled, “only alchemized.” Thus, as he said, “many times it’s become a paragraph or a page.” You wonder how people get through life without story, without words on paper. Talk to any artist. Any writer. Anyone praying on their knees. You’ve learned that empty can be seen, touched, and felt. You keep writing, year after year like a bird in flight landing on that naked tree across your parking lot.
Saying you write to make sense of the world sounds like cliché, something you’ve read in many writing textbooks. It’s true, of course, but it’s more than that. You need to make the connections for others to see. You need the intellectual struggle to bring thoughts together, one by one, as if in doing so there’s a path forward or a road backwards. You need to remember.
GAIL HOSKING is the author of the memoir Snake’s Daughter: The Roads in and out of War (U of Iowa Press), the poetry chapbook The Tug (Finishing Line Press), and a recent book of poems (March 2020) Retrieval from Main Street Rag Press. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and taught at Rochester Institute of Technology for 15 years.
Her essays and poems have appeared in such places as Nimrod International, The Florida Review, Post Road, Reed Magazine, Waxwing and Assay. Several pieces have been anthologized. She’s been a finalist for several contests and her essays have appeared as “most notable” in Best American Essays.
