I looked up into the kind, motherly face, the pebble smooth grey hair, and the eyes like candlelit windows of my friend. I never knew her name. I was too shy at twelve years old to ask anyone their name. I just knew that she worked at Greater Bookland in Brunswick, a place that had been a refuge as well as a passion since its opening, and that she always had a smile for me, and that today, she held a gift in her hands, and she was holding it out to me.
I was almost too shy to take it from her hands, but her voice, warm and comforting as hot cocoa, encouraged me. “This is from your friends at Greater Bookland,” she told me.
I carefully peeled away the wrapping paper. From the shape, the heft of the gift in my hands, I thought I knew what it was. The only thing that has ever given me greater pleasure to hold in my hands than a book has been the hands of my children.
The gift was precisely what I thought it was: a Gemstone collection blank book. Blue fire opal, the glowing colors swirling against a cerulean background. The delicious gilt edged acid free pages, with nary a pencil smudge or an ink blot. A fresh start, like a new day, with no mistakes in it.
But there was writing in this one. In elegant hand were the words, “Keep writing.”
I was so overcome with shyness that it was all I could do to lift my eyes to my friend and stammer out a coherent Thank You. It was the very first time anyone other than my grandparents had ever encouraged my writing. My friend’s eyes glowed understanding, and then she turned away to go back to work. Working the cash register perhaps. Or stocking brand new paperbacks, or helping someone find the cookbooks. Just another work day at the bookstore for my friend; a day that would linger in my heart forever for me.
It wasn’t my first Gemstone collection blankbook. They were the hallmark of my childhood writing endeavors. Covers as shiny and smooth as the polished gemstones they represented. So many patterns, so many textures, so many colors of gemstones on those blank book covers. Although the covers were smooth, you could almost feel the points of the amethyst, the rough edges of the agate, and the polished coolness of the sodalite. The acid-free paper was thick and luxurious under the hand, and there was a place for your name and the date on the first thick glossy page. But this blank book was the first acknowledgment that I was a writer.
My journey as a writer had begun some years before with a deep, sensual connection to paper. The smell, the feel of different kinds of paper under the hands. The way different types of pencils felt when connecting with different textures of paper. As I write, I am kneeling on the floor in my childhood room, the one with the faded rosebud curtains and the tacky flowery wallpaper and the windows that look out on pointed firs. It’s the room where I first knew I was a writer, holding the very first blank book I ever had. This is the book that made me a writer. A floral fabric blank book smudged with pencil lead (oh, those number 2 Garfield pencils with the gooey pink erasers that just begged to be chewed like gum when you were thinking hard about the next word). The first cautious words written in my careful first grade hand: “It was vacation.”
Growing up Christian fundamentalist, I always knew that my love for writing could not lead anywhere. I would never be allowed to write like L. M. Montgomery did, stories purely from my mind and heart and imagination. Writing stories like those could lead to ex-communication from the Church. I knew what excommunication looked like— losing every
one and everything you had ever known— and I knew I did not want that to happen to me. I knew I could only write heavy handed moral stories like Louisa May Alcott did, stories for young people encouraging them to be faithful to the Christian group we were in, Sunday School stories connecting real life events with a lesson. I would never be free to find my own voice; I would have to be the voice of the fundamentalists. This was an unspoken but understood rule, just like all the others. Growing up in my Church, I learned the rules, not through being taught, but by sideways glances and unfinished sentences. “Oh, that book is a little…” “oh, Christians don’t read books like…” “don’t you think that book is… worldly?” (There was nothing, absolutely nothing, half so evil as being “worldly”).
But in the same way that my friend at Bookland gave me permission to be a writer, my Mom gave me permission to be a reader. And not always books that were on the “approved list for young homeschooling girls.” When you grow up like I did, you aren’t reading what “everyone else” is reading, except maybe in school. There are so many books that are forbidden that I dove deep into what was allowed.
Day after winter day, I’d come inside from playing in the snow, sledding, digging tunnels, playing Snow Rescuers… our favorite game… to curl up at my Mom’s feet so she could read to me. My mother began me on the path to lifelong love of books by reading me, not only Anne of Green Gables, “remember, kindred spirits are always together in spirit”) but the entire Anne series, right up through Rainbow Valley. It would not be until years later that I was old enough to appreciate the wartime journal that was Rilla of Ingleside.
My Mom read to me not only Little Women, but also Louisa May Alcott’s other lesser known works: Eight Cousins, and Rose in Bloom, An Old Fashioned Girl, and Little Men. She read me Freckles, by Gene Stratton-Porter, which as I think back kindled a lifelong love of the woods and nature. We read series like Honey Bunch and The Bobbsey Twins and Bunnie Brown and his Sister Sue. I could never get enough of being read to, and then once I could read independently, of finding my own love of books. This is rich soil for a writer to grow from.
My dearest memories of bookstores are of the old book barns and antique shops full of fabric and cardboard covered books from a century past. I feel the frayed fabric spines in my hands, I learn to recognize books that were printed during the war, because the texture of the paper is thinner and coarser. The smell of must and mold, the eccentric book sellers who are so delighted to talk books with people who love them. The creak of wooden floors under my feet. The leap of the heart when I find a title I have been searching for. There is no internet, no Amazon, no online ordering, in those days.
The stories I wrote on those satiny pages were just about what you’d expect from a girl who grew up on such a wholesome diet of old fashioned books in such a circumscribed world of Christian fundamentalists. Old fashioned. I scaffolded my favorite books when I wrote my own stories, learned to tell stories by copying what other writers did.
After dinner every evening, the family would gather in a quiet circle in the living room to read the Bible out loud. As soon as we were old enough to read aloud, we all took turns stumbling over the jaw breaking names in Chronicles, the Elizabethan English (“1611 English was good enough for St. Paul and good enough for Jesus so it’s good enough for us”), the mystic and bewildering “wheels within wheels” in Ezekiel, the torrents of blood and the coarse language that wouldn’t be tolerated anywhere but the Bible reading. I was intensely schooled by the poetry, the corking good story telling, and the sheer beauty of language in the King James Bible. Reading it aloud, feeling the language on the tongue and in the breath, made me slow down enough to internalize the patterns, and I’ve since come to believe that an objective read through the Bible is good training for a writer. That beauty didn’t help much when I was struggling to figure out if “shekel” was pronounced with a long or a short ‘e’. The beauty of the phrases sing in my mind many years since I first discovered them, long after the memory of sitting squirming in my own prescriptive “green chair” at Bible hour has faded.
One late November afternoon, I rounded a corner in my childhood treasure store Brunswick Bookland and stumbled upon the poetry section, upon a small red-covered selection of English verse, and I discovered poetry for the first time. Real poetry. Not the sickly saccharine sweet stuff we had to read as kids. The real stuff. The matchless lines in How do I love thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Home Thoughts from Abroad by Robert Browning and Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal by Lord Tennyson, all sang in my mind, and a part of me that had lain dormant, a part that responded to the magic that is created when the right words come together, awakened.
Not long after that unforgettable day, I was browsing amongst the bookshelves in the basement of my childhood home, looking for something to read. I had been following the writing journey of Emily of New Moon through her struggles and renewals and triumphs, and I was hungry for more. More stories about girls and women who had more choices in their lives than I, a fundamentalist pre-teen, would ever have. Was it serendipity? Coincidence? I discovered an old copy of Jane Eyre that my Mom had read in high school. And in the pages of that book, I got my first taste of feminism.
Women in the fundamentalists are valued and respected in theory, but in practice, we are treated as second class citizens. A woman can’t teach or preach or speak in meeting, (we called Sunday services “meeting”), even to pray or call a hymn. A woman most certainly can not know more than a man. She must always defer to the men in her life, whether her father, her brothers, or her husband. A woman’s place is in the home. She is expected to raise the children and guide the home and always submit to her husband. So Jane’s impassioned equality speech to Mr. Rochester hit me, as we say in Maine, “upside the head with a two by four.” The concept of a marriage based on equality and “the mutual help, society, and comfort that one ought to have of another” was another dazzling light. Jane Eyre gave me new thoughts, new ideas, and a new perspective, and for the first time, I could see another way of living outside my small circle.
My next taste of feminism, my first glimpse of what equality for women looked like, came through Star Trek. Growing up Christian fundamentalist means we didn’t have television. Not only did we not have it, we were forbidden to watch it. So I came to Star Trek through the world of the novels. I had to read those novels “on the sly,” perhaps disguising them with construction paper covers. In these strange new worlds, there were women in places of leadership, something I had never seen before. There were women medical professionals and scientists and security officers. They were working side by side with men as equals. Star Trek is meant to be a hopeful vision of a more diverse future, and it is, but it can also be a vision of what our present day world can look like. What young girls can aspire to be right here and now. Star Trek has inspired so many people to be astronauts, engineers, doctors, and scientists. It inspired me to be a writer.
And in the blank book that my friend at Greater Bookland gave me, with so much love and warmth in her eyes, I began to write my own Star Trek story. Some thirty odd years later, I am still working on it.
The strength and fire of my literary companions have stayed with me and given me the courage to go on through all those years, from leaving fundamentalism to leaving an oppressive marriage to leaving toxic work environments. In leaving all those places that stifled my voice, I am learning to find my voice again.
Such a great story from your past! Thanks for sharing!
❤️