The last time I moved, everything was in a rush. I had been unemployed and my new job started just a month in the future and half a country away. I slung things into boxes and unpacked, haphazardly, on weekends. In the decade since then, life has been a blur.
Lately I’ve been trying to find things. While sorting through a stack of paperwork, I came across a box of old stories. Really old. Some of these tales go back to when I first started to write fiction. Most of them are embarrassing, but when I recall how young I was, they aren’t as embarrassing as all that.
One of the stories I remembered writing as a ninth or tenth grader. My English teacher told me I should try to get it published. I lived in a small town where no one had connections to the publishing world, and where nobody really knew how to get anything published.
Where you’re born does make a difference.
The story was in a pile of papers I found. It seems to have born its age well, but some of the magic is knowing that the kid who wrote it was maybe fourteen or fifteen and had lived a very sheltered small town life. Now, I know, the story would not be publishable.
Literary journals today want trendy, cool, and sophisticated writing. They don’t value the sentiment of a story of a young boy in a rural setting just awakening to the possibility that there is more to life than he ever imagined.
Perhaps decades ago, when I wrote the story, some publisher somewhere might have considered it as a juvenile effort. Being published back then might have changed my perspective on the difficulties of trying to find a voice in today’s literary world.
I’m still not trendy or cool. Thoughtful, curious, and at times irreverent, yes. But I am still that little boy, wondering what more might be out there.
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