Writing Roots

On

Raining Days

Around the age of five, I began to make sense

of those books in our study. My father often sat at

his drafting table, feverishly flipping through the JC

Whitney Catalogs. He always had a project that he

was working on down below the study in his garage.

The hard back green books had a special place on the

shelves. Those catalogs

were where I could reach

them too.

I remember hefting

one off the shelf, trying

to figure its content. I

took it to the window to

watch my father down

below. He didn’t take

them downstairs. Instead, he made trips back and

forth from the study to the garage. I made the con-

nection of its content and images and began to won-

der into his garage. I learned by observation, not to

read for pleasure, but for progress. My father fixed

and built many things in that garage. He was a me-

chanical engineer and inventor.

My invitation to learning took root on rainy

days in that study, when I could not go outdoors.

Nothing held my interest inside the home, except for

those books. I was not like my sis-

ters, who liked to be with Mother;

making crafts, sewing, painting, and

cooking. I liked to be outside ob-

serving nature, building things, and

learning the skills of my father’s

trails and trade.

Many kinds of books seated

and remained untouched. I cultivat-

ed a love of reading nonfiction on those lower

shelves, researching information on the earth and

stars, America, people and cultures, inventors and

inventions, and interchangeable parts. The World

Book Encyclopedias were never taken outside the

house, but often I would race back and forth to iden-

tify any simple life that sur-

rounded me.

The first time I laid

eyes on an American corn

snake, I thought for a mo-

ment it was a coral snake. I

had studied the head

shapes and eyes. I wanted

to believe it was a coral

snake, but I knew better, because the encyclopedia

was fact. It didn’t take me long to grow a tale. I took

the “S” encyclopedia to convince my dad that I knew

what I had seen, and that there was a coral snake in

the yard. I went so far as to research the territory

where the snake was indigenous to another region

and formed a rebuttal with the change of terrains

from population and weather. My father reluctantly

came with me to see the serpent.

other lined the wall behind the built-in bookcase

with corduroy upholstery fabric. Oxblood red

and rough cedar shelving spanned wall to wall

and from floor to a twelve-foot redwood tongue-n-groove ceiling. Moth-

er and father gifted the shelves with reclaimed books from the down-

town law library of Little Rock, Arkansas. They adorned their study

with library tables and chairs from the demolition of the old structure

in 1975, when the new William H. Bowen Law School was built.

M

“To do things worthy the writing

and to write worthy the doing

thereof and thereby to make the

much loved earth more lovely.”

Philip Sidney

After all, I was holding a book of facts and swore by

what I’d seen. The snake had slithered away before I

had returned with my father, hand in hand. I attested

that it was a coral snake, even though I knew that it was-

n’t. I wanted it to be and had almost convinced myself

of an untruthful deception. I formed an art to lying in

my youth.

I began writing stories around the age of seven. Oh,

how I would stretch the truth. This isn’t the case in my

adult life; many hard lessons in truth and trust continue

to mold me into who I am.

My luck in lessons come with

a price in understanding many

facts of manipulation and de-

ception. They are crafts of de-

ceit. I wish to go back to the

time of youth, where I mar-

veled in understanding the

beauty of nonfiction, because

it was my connection with re-

ality. That connection is what

led me to the writing depart-

ment at UALR. Learning and

progressing through research

of interests enables a busy body to do what it wants and

needs to do for progress. I did not always make short

tales with what I read in younger years. Some of what I

studied came into good use.

The medical encyclopedias from the law library interest-

ed me for months and years. There were eight of them,

hardback. Petit in comparison to the JC Whitney cata-

logs, short and thick. Any time I heard of a new aliment

or disease at school, I would race to the study when I

got home and research for hours. One afternoon, as we

were stepping off the school bus, a neighbor boy suf-

fered a grand mal seizure. I knew exactly what to do. I

directed four people, including the bus driver, to assist

in laying him flat, holding his head, shoulders, hips and

limbs, while I took his belt off to depress his tongue, so

that he would not swallow it and cut off his airway.

There have been several other incidents in my life that I

called my hours of study to offer first response and di-

rect others to assist. My interest for learning and discov-

ery has become a lifelong habit.

My father built a

loft in the bookcase for

me. The solid frame tow-

ered the opposite side of

the seven foot oblong win-

dow and stood about eight

feet high. I pulled a twin

mattress up to the plateau.

This vantage lead me

through a journey of

books nestled on those

upper shelves that I could

not have otherwise

reached. I had climbed the

shelves for curiosity, and been told not to because it was

dangerous. I gained access to some books that I should

have left alone by following my naughty temptations,

like “Valley of the Dolls,” by Jacqueline Susann.

Right about that time, my mother took a job at Ander-

son News. She was undergoing chemotherapy and radia-

tion for breast cancer that had spread to her lymph, but

she sought life and healing through work. She brought

home magazines and books with the covers torn off,

often bestsellers which pop culture deemed relevant and

critics marveled.

“Happiness itself is sufficient excuse.

Beautiful things are right and true; so

beautiful actions are those pleasing to the

gods. Wise men have an inward sense of

what is beautiful, and the highest wisdom is

to trust this intuition and be guided by it.

The answer to the last appeal of what is

right lies within a man’s own breast. Trust

thyself.”

I soon lost my love for reading as a teen. My fiction con-

sumption of Dean R. Koontz and Stephen King novels

lead me to the self-help section at the local library. I

read “Feeling Good” by David D. Burns,

“Psychocybernetics” and “The Magic Power of Self-

Image Psychology,” by Maxwell Maltz. I needed to heal,

I had already seen too much and hurt for what I had

witnessed.

My writing took a turn toward truth in my

teens, but I kept it hidden. I did not wish to share my

personal thoughts and experiences. They were private. I

didn’t share and kept long hours to myself on the oppo-

site end of the rock and cedar house’s study. I remained

opposite of everyone in my home. My parent’s became

curious of my isolation and my father invaded while I

was away at school, he found my compilation of stacks

of stories in an octagon shaped curio. It was a penuri-

ous piece of Asian teakwood that my mother had

picked up at some yard sale.

My father approached me one evening at the

dinner table, “Kim, I think you are a good writer. You

don’t have to lock yourself up in your room to write.

Why don’t you use the study?” He went on to talk

about a character and plot that I had written and my

mind went blank. My ears started buzzing and my heart

raced from embarrassment in the one sided conversa-

tion. I remained silent.

Later that week, after my father ap-

proached my secret, I rebelled against my own self. I

drug my curio out back, in the yard, behind my parent’s

sliding glass doors, doused it with lighter fluid, and

watched it burn. In the seconds the pages started to

curl, I’d wished that I could visit the stories again. I told

myself, they were my stories and would forever be in my

head. I did not write again for a while, until my early

twenties.

Moving back in with my folk’s after being

stalked by a mental escapee who hitchicked his way

from Virginia to torment me, a stranger; a man shoot-

ing and robbing my purse at an ATM, a stranger; and I

had moved back in with my parent’s, but they had built

a new home atop Tucker Mountain. That’s where I be-

gan to write the story of a tri-state bank robbery, based

on truth. Again, in hiding, writing my first script. The

endeavor ended in corruption by a lightning storm. I

thought the odds were against me for becoming a writ-

er.

I had tried to go back to the house that I grew

up in, but it was desolate. My mother held onto that

home for years, leaving it vacant—but fully furnished.

The books in the study, still, dormant and collecting

cobwebs. They were auctioned off with the contents of

the house, when mother decided it was time to let it go

of the past. I began journaling for the first time and try-

ing my hand at calligraphy in personal correspondence.

I fell deeply in love with the art, collecting ink, pens,

and different fibers of paper.

In my thirties, I picked up reading fiction again;

John Steinbeck, Robert Penn Warren, William Faulk-

ner, Elmore Leonard, Larry McMurtry, and Charles

Portis. Several titles from each of these authors gave me

a love of fiction that I had never known, yet nothing

seemed to fill the void and need, except nonfiction. It

drives me. I believe it is the truth that makes us healthy

and able to survive. After my first paid job as a technical

writer in the automotive industry, I knew that I needed

to go back to where I started. I entered into a writing

program at the university to refine myself.