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Sunday Series: S.A. Snyder on Why I Write

In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome S.A. Snyder, memoirist and live storyteller who shares how writing is like breathing.

Photo by Pablo Orcaray on Unsplash

You may have heard the expression, “If you have to ask the question, you won’t understand the answer.” In my case, I don’t even understand the question sometimes. Why do I write? For me, it’s not a choice in the same way breathing is not a choice, which is why the question is difficult to answer. Because I have to lacks reason. So after deeper scrutiny, the following is what I came up with.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve written stories in my head. They arrived like boisterous friends, wanting to be seen and heard, unstoppable. I started keeping a journal in third grade, which really took off when Rumble, my pet mouse, died of old age in the palm of my hand. I was inconsolable. Through journaling about my grief, I discovered the remarkable power of transformation. I could now cope with and better understand troubling and perplexing experiences through writing about them.

I come from a long line of control freaks. Being the youngest in a five-pack of siblings, however, didn’t leave me much chance to control while growing up. Elder siblings were always bossing me around. Not only was transformation possible through writing, creating stories also gave me the power to govern the narrative; to make sure the underdog came out on top.

In college I studied forestry and wildlife biology, leading to work as a field biologist. Yet stories kept begging to be written, not just fiction but stories of place and people in it. I returned to school for a master’s in journalism. Marrying my two passions—writing and nature—I wrote about the environment, wildlife, and outdoor recreation. I also wrote a lot of tips-and-tricks material, called “service journalism” back then. Today we call it life hacking.

As I got older, my boisterous friends continued to visit with enthusiasm, turning their faces toward knowledge-sharing, showing up as lessons learned, wisdom gained. Now I blog about self-care and retreats. My memoir took twenty years to finish and publish, though, because I kept telling myself no one cared about wisdom I learned. Even an agent said, “You’re an outstanding writer, but no one wants to read a spiritual journeying memoir by an unknown. Call me when you have something I can sell.” A year after that harsh rejection, Eat, Pray, Love hit the shelves. Who had ever heard of Elizabeth Gilbert before? I gave up for a while, and then my soul, fueled somewhat by resentment, pushed me to write through multiple drafts of my memoir. Doing so gave me the courage to express deeply personal things, which I’ve always had difficulty talking about let alone putting on paper. Writing my story also taught me to ignore others’ judgments about whether I have an audience. I’m confident my stories will find the people who need them.

I used to compare myself a lot with others, but not so much now that I’m closer to sixty than fifty. Writing is one aspect I still play the comparison game with. Am I as good as her?Will my books ever sell as much as his? When I’m blocked or feeling low in self-confidence, or when it becomes hard—because writing is so damn hard sometimes—I wonder whether I should give it up and be satisfied with my day job. No. It would be useless to try quitting writing, because if you hold your breath long enough, you just pass out then you automatically start breathing again.

A couple of years ago I got hooked on live personal-experience storytelling. It helps me hone my writing craft and provides instant feedback. When I hear the audience gasp or laugh, see them tear up, I know I’m hitting my mark. Now others breathe my stories, too.

S.A. SNYDER has been a professional writer and editor since 1991, including newspaper columnist and reporter, technical writer, writing instructor, communications manager and consultant, blogger, and book author. She lives in Virginia, where she participates in oral storytelling and writes a blog (www.LunaRiverVoices.com) about retreating and self-care, among other random topics. She is the author of three nonfiction books and numerous newspaper and magazine articles. Her latest book, The Value of Your Soul: Rumi Verse for Life’s Annoying Moments, due in September 2020, is a spinoff of her memoir, Plant Trees, Carry Sheep: A Woman’s Spiritual Journey Among the Sufis of Scotland.

Her travel guide, Scenic Driving Montana, showcases her home state and was first published in 1995. The 4th edition will be published in 2021.

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Sunday Series: Gail Hosking on Why I Write

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.

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Sunday Series: Kari O’Driscoll on Why I Write

In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Kari O’Driscoll, who sees writing as “a form of alchemy.” 

Photo by Kei Scampa from Pexels

These days, asking me why I write is like asking me why I breathe. It has become such a part of who I am, such a daily practice, that I am often ‘writing’ in my head as I experience the world – walking my dogs, preparing a meal, talking on the phone to a friend. Ultimately, writing is a form of alchemy for me, a way to find or make meaning out of something that is seemingly without any, or that is complicated and tangled and often overwhelming.

One of my odd talents is a skill for unraveling knotted necklaces. My kids both learned, early on, that if they had a chain they wanted to wear that was hopelessly twisted and matted, they could bring it to me and I’d set to work. No matter how little patience I had with anything else going on, there was something about slowly picking at the strands and knots that put me in a zen state.

I don’t know if it was the certain knowledge that there was a solution if I just kept at it, or if the consequences seemed so innocuous if I didn’t manage to undo the mess, but somehow I could settle in to a peaceful, methodical rhythm and restore it to its desired state. That’s what writing does for my head and my heart and my spirit – allows me to come to a place where I know there is meaning if I trust and if I focus and spend time looking at something from all angles, turning it over and over again in my mind but not forcing it, picking at one strand and then another to see what happens, gently loosening one loop from another.

As a kid, I believed life happened to me. The combination of traumatic events, authoritarian parents, and being a certain age meant that I felt as though I had no control over the things I experienced, no matter how much I tried to make meaning of them. Talking to adults never seemed to help; either they couldn’t explain things in a way that made sense to my youthful brain or they were impatient with the questions and refused to engage. For decades, I accepted that there were things that I would never be able to make sense of, and I resigned myself to studying the things I could, like math and science, and ducked to avoid the others. But in my late 30s, I began writing as a way to release some of the constant chatter in my brain. If I couldn’t untangle the knots, at least I could get them out of my head and on to paper so I didn’t have to hold them all inside any longer. And that’s when I discovered the magic of transformation.

Our bodies aren’t designed to hold emotion. But when we let our brains grab on to emotional responses – especially the big ones like fear and anger – and wrap stories around them, they become stuck. The more we tell ourselves those stories in our own heads, the bigger the knot gets and the heavier it is to carry. But when I write those things down – even if it’s a jumble of words – scared, sad, overwhelmed, why, angry, painful, broken, willitalwaysbelikethis, whatiswrongwithme, idontknowhowmuchlongericandothis, listening to her cry is breaking my heart, helpless, birds singing outside, the cat came to head-butt me just now – the knots start to come undone. And if I walk after writing or I talk to a friend, they release and relax even more. And if I string together more observations and more messy piles of words and feelings and observations, the patterns begin to reveal themselves and my heart and my head and my spirit find peace. Alchemy. Transforming fear to wonder. Rage to realization. Confusion to harmony.

Writing is the vehicle that takes me there as long as I surrender to it, as long as I trust that I will eventually get to a place of understanding and acceptance, as long as I sit down quietly and begin unraveling the knots.

KARI O’DRISCOLL is a writer and mother of two living in the Pacific NW. She is the author of One Teenager at a Time: Developing Self-Awareness and Critical Thinking in Adolescence, and the recently released memoir, Truth Has a Different Shape. Her other work has been featured in anthologies on parenting, reproductive rights, and cancer as well as appearing online in outlets such as Ms. Magazine and Healthline. She is the founder of The SELF Project, a comprehensive social-emotional health site for teens and parents and educators of teens.

You can find links to her work at  kariodriscollwriter.com. 

*Hidden Timber Books is hosting Kari O’Driscoll as part of their Small Press Author Reading Series on Saturday, May 9th, at 11am Pacific (1pm Central). She’ll be reading from her new memoir, Truth Has a Different Shape. This event is FREE. Register HERE.