Unearthing: From The Bottom Of The Inkwell - A Writer's Journey

I was recently asked about what made me decide to build and launch The Evergreen Inkwell. The easy answer? I had to. My path and creative process as a writer has mirrored my own personal path all my life, and until recently I had never been conscious of that. It was time.

I had been writing for as long as I could remember. A painfully introverted kid in grade school, my day-to-day life crippled me with an overwhelming undefined anxiety. I could burst into tears if an unfamiliar or intimidating person asked me a question. Every day was a determined campaign to slip past unseen, unheard. I was terrified of standing out. The gregarious and outgoing stereotype of my astrological sign of Leo was a cosmic slap of sarcasm, buried deep beneath a longing for social anonymity. But all the while, I knew with all my being that I had something to offer, something to say. Equal to that longing to be invisible paralleled a longing to connect.

I found that putting words to the page from a safe and isolated space afforded me that voice that choked under the anxiety of spontaneous “performance”. Expressing myself through written word removed that terrifying lack of a filter that kept me safe from saying the wrong thing. Choosing the wrong words. The reassurance of knowing that I can carefully review and edit and… reconsider saying the thing at all. A bit ironic considering how little I do just that when I write, but the knowledge of that safety net was the comfort I needed to overcome my anxiety and be able to truly express myself.

So I kept to my quiet corners and I wrote. I was not encouraged or pushed in any way, but when you’re a kid in grade school, you’re tasked to do so now and again. And when I did, I found a place I could shine. I’d occasionally be recognized in a writing contest here, a newspaper publication there, which embarrassed me deeply but also quietly whispered to me that I might have something of value. I never considered it at the time, but well into my forties experiencing somewhat of a well-delayed awakening and reflecting back, I finally connected the dots. Flipping back through high school yearbooks the comments were peppered with references to my writing. And then the bigger question, why did I ever stop? As a youth, a teen, and into my first two years of college, the words flowed from me with an urgent eagerness: poetry, short stories, ideas for screenplays. Letters. Until one day, rather abruptly in hindsight, unannounced and unnoticed, the well silently dried up. Anymore, when the urgency to create faded, I would only put words to the page to process pain and trauma. Something that was happening with increasing frequency while I heard the persistent voice inside my head and talked to myself through the page. Journaling. Writing in the second person. Sorting out my thoughts and feelings, pulling up my own bootstraps and strategizing how to heal myself, improve on myself. Be a better person. Be better. And then one day an epiphany hit. A plausible answer to that unasked question, why did I stop writing?

Here is that journal entry, dated 7 Dec 2022, unedited.

It Died With Blair

Here you are again, my enemy, my cold friend, the blank page.

I used to write. And I loved it. There was a time I was bursting at the seams with ideas for which my ink-stained left hand could not keep up. My peers insisted this is who I am. They couldn’t wait to read what I might produce some day. They encouraged – keep writing.

I used to write 30-page letters.

And then, the person who was reading me was gone.

I failed to realize that the day Blair died was the day that fire died as well.

I hate how I heard the news. I literally heard the news. I was flying down the freeway, that beat up manual shift, manual steering, manual everything old pickup truck. Window down, mind on little else but my destination. Finals were over, done and dusted, it was spring break, baby. I was still within a stone’s throw of the left of the dial, campus radio offering up random indie tunes. And then a quick break for some local headlines.

WWU student Blair Grandstrom…

WHAT!! Blair? On the news? Did I hear that right?

…had been missing for 3 days…

But I had just bumped into Blair on campus last week. Oh yeah. The week before finals. We called that Dead Week.

…body was found…

Shock rippled through me. No. No way. I didn’t hear that right.

…dead in the Georgia Pacific treatment lagoon…

No. No, no, no, no, no. NO. I screamed, shaking, eyes blurred. Gripping the steering wheel, furiously blinking back the monsoon of tears. I shouldn’t have kept driving. 45 minutes more. But I now desperately needed to get home, this can’t be real, this can’t be happening, this can’t be.

I pulled into my parents’ driveway, they had seen me coming up the street and were already standing on the porch to greet me. I tumbled out of the truck sobbing, blurting out what I had heard while running into their arms. As unbelievable to them as well. I immediately locked myself away into my old bedroom and sobbed myself numb, curled into fetal position trying to will it all untrue.

Over the years, Blair’s letters back had impeccable timing. It always seemed the worst days of teen angst and drama would find me arriving home to that distinct incomparable joy of finding one of those fat and tattered envelopes in the mail. To Karin, Love Blair. Front and back, pages upon pages of notebook paper ripped from a spiral, scrawled in a boring class, next paragraph a couple days later from his bedroom. In the back seat, destination: somewhere he didn’t particularly want to be with his parents. Doodles in the margins. Dried rain drops. Bold and urgent black – Karin. The Metallica concert blew my mind. Lazy scrawl from a lousy pen – Let’s go back to the lake house on spring break. A fresh blue ink – my sister is being so annoying. Another page begins, you won’t believe what happened last night. We wrote a lot about nothing, and yet his words kept me afloat.

Maybe it’s not so much the right words, the right subject, the weight. Maybe it’s the devotion of attention, of listening and being listened to, of time spent sharing a space between mailboxes together.

The time surrounding Blair’s funeral was very much a blur as the trauma of this new reality of a world without him continued to rearrange me. But his mom gave me one last gift. She allowed me a quiet space and a slice of time in their home to sit alone with a box of letters I had written him. He had kept them, every last one. I was not offered to take them with me, but I didn’t need to. My letters to him read much like his to me. The mundane, day to day, marking of time in a life and yes, I am thinking about you too. And of course, I have a box of my own. I had kept all his letters to me too.

So I stopped writing. Blair was the one who wrote back.