Essay by Wichita Sims
Fortune? Fame? If Only
Some of us write in an obsessive-compulsive manner. We’ll never be widely recognized; we’ll never make enough money to claim “author” as an occupation on our tax returns. People won’t talk about us because they are not reading us. We won’t impose ourselves on the masses (though we would like to), because we can’t.
The question of why I write, with such anonymity and very little monetary reward, gets me to examine my inner workings, which I’d rather not do. I write because of my tortured childhood. I decide all writers write because of a need to expunge the oozy pus from their adolescent memories.
Although I like the imagery I’ve created in the previous sentence, I discard that idea after rereading it. My adulthood oozes just as much pus, with no one to blame but myself.
I write, I decide, because I like expanding my horizons. I like to reach out, to attend workshops and classes. Before I die, I will have acquired enough knowledge to write the quintessential piece of literature that will be so moving and accurate that I will cease to exist the minute I finish keyboarding it.
As I reread that sentence, I realize it’s crap, too. I like to attend writing workshops because they serve cake, sometimes homemade crumb cake that you can’t get anywhere else but in the writing teacher’s kitchen, where she made it the day before.
Why do I write? Why? I don’t know. I have written for as long as I can remember. I have written throughout grammar school, high school, and college. I have written day in and day out. I have written odd lists, short stories, personal essays, movie scripts, plays, and hideous poetry.
I am seldom published. Yet, still I continue, as if writing were my day job and if I don’t persevere, I won’t be able to put coleslaw on the dinner table.
The truth may be that I simply enjoy the act of writing, typing words on my computer and watching the screen fill up. No magic. No ego. Often after I’m done with what I consider a decent piece, I lose it. I don’t know if that’s intentional or if I’m like a mother who carefully raises her child to adulthood and then slams the front door in his face.
You’re an adult. Take care of yourself. Quit bothering me.
Some of my friends don’t understand this attitude. They say, “Look for that piece you wrote, where you said cancer was like a crack whore.”
No, I will not. I do not even remember writing it, and I’m not kidding. “If I wrote it,” I tell these friends, “that story was ingested by my computer, two computers ago.”
I don’t feel bad about my lie, either. I just move on to another piece, such as how my sister and I are sharing my dead father’s medical degree and dispensing gynecological advice to our friends whether they want it or not. I will work on that piece until I finish it (or sometimes not) and then move on to the next one.
I am like those freight trains you hear in the night with their whistles blowing, rumbling along at a slow pace, hauling some nonperishable bit of goods in their dilapidated boxcars from one small town to another and then doing it again on the flip side. Continuous. Nothing special. It is simply what I do.
Editor’s Note: For several years, Wichita Sims participated in the “Cancer in Other Words” workshop run by Autumn Stephens. Don’t miss “In the Cancer Room” by Stephens, her own meditation about leading the workshop.
Art Information
- “Dandelion Heads” and “Storm” © Lois Shelden; used by permission
Wichita Sims is the pseudonym of an author living in Pacifica, California, by that big Taco Bell on the beach. She has attended many of Autumn Stephens’s workshops, enjoyed them all, and learned a lot about writing, although possibly accidentally between bites of crumb cake. To find more of her personal essays, visit her website at wichitasims.com.
