What Took Me So Long to Start Writing?

 

 

    Jane Edmonds is a Stage 3 student at the 

Open College of the Arts, studying poetry and prose. 

At this moment, she is writing a memoir of her life, as she

travelled around the world as both a child and a young woman.

At Stage Three, she is reaching the culmination of her degree pathway and will soon graduate with honours.  Although she's in her eighties, she's an energetic student with plenty of ideas and a great sense of humour, and her output is worthy of someone a quarter of her age. I asked her why she 'left it quite late' to study something she is clearly so passionate about, and this is what she explained to me:

'I’m shy about telling people I’m doing a creative writing degree, because at 85 it seems either ridiculous or a boast about my mental ability. The responses when I do own up are variable:

‘Good on you!’

‘Really?’ with a slight frown.

Jane in Malta

Or a shrug and turning away because ‘what is creative writing and anyway…sorry, not interested.’

But I am interested in writing and still puzzled why I didn’t take myself seriously enough to engage at degree level. What were the barriers, the excuses, I set up for myself? 

I have a notebook sent to me by my grandmother in 1949. I know the date because my name and the date of my eleventh birthday are printed in gold lettering on the leather cover. I’ve never been able to write in it. It has expectations and depressing blue pages with lines. I didn’t write anything other than school essays until, as a young wife and mother who had seen so much of the world and its people, the full force of the life I was living overwhelmed me. By then, it felt to me that there really was no time for writing. 

I did write, though. Poetry, intermittent diaries, notes in unlined notebooks, on the backs of envelopes, margins of newspapers. These are stacked in boxes as a sometimes surprising, sometimes shaming archive. 

It was at this stage of my life I met Val Giamatti, father of a friend. He was Professor of Italian studies at Mount Holyoke University in America. A born teacher, enthusiast for Dante, with an all- embracing warmth of personality. For a year or two I exchanged letters and cards with him. In one card he tells me to ‘write poems, novels for publication as you express yourself so well.’ 

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/directory/departments-offices-centers/classics-and-italian/valentine-giamatti-lecture-and-dante-collection

I also sent poems to a librarian friend who wrote an encouraging critique. Although I have kept these responses since the 1970s it is only now that I can believe they saw something in my writing, raw though it was, that was worth nurturing.

Reading has always been my greatest pleasure. At first anything to hand, then after the classics, discovery of T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, the American novelists - Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler helped me become more discriminating. In my hubristic youth I decided I didn’t need academics to tell me what was worthwhile literature. I still don’t. But I wasn’t able to analyse what makes effective writing, which I have been learning the past few years with the Open College of the Arts (OCA).

In the early days of the Open University my father suggested taking one of their courses. Apart from being averse to anything he thought might be good for me, I still had reservations about academia and a deep-rooted objection to exams as I think of them as a test of memory. The continuous assessment of OCA suits my style of learning and is probably more rigorous.The need to earn a living as a nurse took over from family cares and even when I retired I took up art and creative sewing, until finally I was attracted to OCA through a random brochure in the post. 

All of the above makes me the arch procrastinator. Not for me the daily excuse of cleaning the house or going shopping. No - I have allowed a disbelief in myself to make me content to fiddle at the edges, until it is almost too late to call myself a writer. Even when I started with OCA I didn’t intend to do more than one or two units for interest, though as a ‘why not’ I signed up for the degree.  It was the third unit of Level 1 Creative Arts Today, that finally grabbed me. Exploring what I thought about very modern visual art, close reading of the first two paragraphs of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and the positive tutor 
feedback gave me a buzz. I became hungry for more brain food. 

Poetry at level 2 continued to take me into new worlds of writing and experimenting and just enjoying playing with words. Now, writing a memoir is another genre to explore. 

Within the creative writing community at OCA, more visible since the pandemic, I feel at ease as a student; have left behind the reasons for not writing. I enjoy the collaborative aspect of a peer group whose writing I respect and whose comments come from the same level of struggle and gain. 

Nowadays if I’m roaming round unanchored because I haven’t got a book to read, I think ‘I’ll start writing myself. It’s just as absorbing.'

Thank you, Jane, and I'm sure we all wish you the very best of luck for graduation.