When I was growing up, I would ask my Maw Maw Norma to tell me a story. I would ask her again and again until I heard about the stories of her eight street-wise children growing up in New Orleans: the penny-pinching, the Mardi Gras parades, the fights, the perverts, the bonds, the life lessons. As Maw Maw Norma would start the story, my younger aunts would interject. Sandy would give an animated version of events; Sherry would provide the necessary details. Maw Maw Norma would tell them, "She's going to be a writer when she grows up."
When I was in college, my major was journalism for about one semester. I let someone talk me into going to law school. That someone had a lot of help from the media. While in law school, I wrote like a writer. That's what my professor so matter-of-factly stated. I stayed up all night revising my Moot Court brief to make it less storylike and more argumentative. When Kane woke up for school, I was still sitting in the same spot where I had plopped down after tucking him in. My brief was good. I argued it before two appellate judges and a professor, and they called me a few days later to tell me I'd made Moot Court. I'm tooting my own horn, here, but I have a point.
Would that be a moot toot?
Now, I write literature reviews and work on my theoretical framework or revise my research questions. Again, I know how to follow the rules to make it work. As we prepare for our classroom observations, my research team has to calibrate, create a consensus of what needs to be in an observation and what doesn't. Again, I write like a writer. "Yours is really detailed." This is an observation of my observation; it's not a compliment. We are also advised to write each day to build our stamina for our dissertations, our futures as researchers. I may struggle with Bonferroni and Chi-square, but I have no problem with writing.
My quandary lies in how writing, the creative kind, is consistently pushed to the back burner. Why is that? It's not like it hasn't been staring right at me all of these years. We are the product of our choices. The academic writer has had much more practice over the years than the storyteller. The storyteller sits there tapping her fingers on the table top, blowing her bangs away from her raised eyebrows. She lashes out now and again with an intoxicated ire.
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
'Fool' said my Muse to me, 'look in thy heart and write.'
-Sir Philip Sidney
