Of Words and Roots

My love of writing began with a love of books.  A childhood of reading brought me to an appreciation of the beauty and power of words. 

Words stringed together in a sentence, and sentences woven into paragraphs can effect mood and create style that can both please and fascinate me.

Words can fire up my imagination. Words can make me see.  Words can impact my very being. With words I can inspire, anger, enlighten, influence…Words have power.  As with all art, with words I had the power to create.  This power to create was what drove me.

For my sixth birthday, Lola Tanciang gave me three fairy tale books.  Since then I’ve loved reading and from this, blossomed my desire to write.

In high school I was a shy academic achiever who brought bundles of books home.  I won the prize for borrowing the most books.  I read mostly literary works—anthologies of American, English and world literature, short stories and poetry.  I wrote little essays like “For the Love of Books”, “On Shooing Away Pests”, “Not –So –Sweet –Sixteen”, and “The Legacy”—some kind of short  story I didn’t really  care much about-- which won a school prize and got published in the school book.

I was a melancholy adolescent who , in her spare time, wrote, and daydreamed, and read, and watched the moon.  As a fourteen-year-old, then, I may have had plenty of promise to be a writer of some measure but that writer in me shriveled up and died from a lack of cultivation and use.

I went to college on a nursing scholarship.  My time and energies were spent on the necessary task of acquiring a degree for a means of living.  At this time, much of my writing was done in journals.

After college, I made some feeble attempts at narrating complex life experiences in little booklets.  Writing then, was more therapy for me, than anything else.

In my twenties, I made a living of teaching nursing students.  The only gratifying thing about that job was how it brought me back to the library. Once again, I was bringing hordes of books home.  I became fascinated with female writers like Gail Sheehy, Alice Walker, Joan Didion, Alice McDermott, Anais Nin, and poets like Eudora Welty, Sylvia Plath, Sara Teasdale, not as much for their ideas as for their style.  Their essays, and stories, to me, felt musical or poetic ;  their poetry, to me, had the cadences and rhythm of  a dance.

I browsed the great classics.  Jane Austen appealed to me more than any other classic writer.  Plowing through John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and like  authors was laborious for me, shallow person that I was.

It’s been said that to attain immortality, one must do one or all of three things: plant a tree, write a book, sire a child.

At thirty, married, with a son born to me, I felt compelled to write about my childhood.  Growing up poor, Life bequeathed me with  rich experiences, and a unique perspective.

Place and time had so far removed me from my childhood that I have this fear of losing altogether whatever significant recollections I have of it.  I am compelled now, more than ever, to write about that place on earth that in my subconscious mind will always be home, the remarkable figures that lived there, and all its colorful heritage of stories and memories, so my son and generations of his offspring, no matter where they might be in the world, will have an appreciation, if not reverence of their ROOTS.