Why I write...

I could tell you why I write about education, how that is one way I think I can contribute to helping people dream something better, but since the National Writing Project asked, "why I write?" I thought I'd aim this at students...

I started writing long ago, before I could really write at all. I drew pictures and let them change. Sometimes on pieces of paper, sometimes with chalk. I rarely shared them, but they were ways for me to slow down, to think things out, to talk about fears, at least to myself, to talk about hopes, to imagine possibilities...

And though I've moved to using words, words built out of letters (which have never been easy for me), and I use keyboards or I dictate to my computer or phone (because who cares how you get your stories down, just that you get your stories down), I still tell stories for all those reasons, and I've added another - I tell stories because I want others who dream, others who are afraid, others who imagine, to know that they are not alone.

So I write. I pay little attention to specific rules of grammar. I let the technology fix the spelling. I don't construct perfect sentences. And I don't stick to "appropriate" words.

And so I write to tell about fear and sadness...

Midnight Mass

The wind whips off the Sound but I've pulled myself down between the biggest rocks, stones broken free and rolled by those greatest of the earth's glaciers God knows how long ago. I light my tiny fire, trash and newspapers and driftwood and as it starts to warm me I look at those rocks, the sedimentary stripes going vertically, and because of how I know about these boulders, I start to cry.Christmas Eve, no, Christmas Day now, it has to be after two. I went to Midnight Mass at St. Joseph's because no one would know me there. That kept me warm all that time. I kept my hand over the right side of my face as much as I could. I know it's all swollen and black and blue. I know the cut's bad. I got butterflies though at the Rite Aid in the Mall and got those on in the Macy's bathroom then held my face to the tile floor up at the top of the elevators in the garage. That was cold as shit and brought the swelling down some.

When I climbed in Kathy's window at ten she freaked out when she saw me. She even said she'd get her mom, but I told her "no way" and she cleaned it up and put new butterflies on. Then before anyone there got suspicious I went out again, and got to St. Joe's, with food Kathy grabbed for me plus orange juice and cupcakes I bought at the C-mart on the way to church all stuffed in a paper bag. And then, well fuck him. Fuck them all. I'm not going home. I might never go home...

...and I write to explain how I sometimes see the world in strange ways...

Vision

I thought the picture of them in the pool was our flooded basement. Does this represent a curious way of seeing? My mom, dad, brother, sister by a ladder in water. We didn't swim in pools, not til later. The ocean was at the end of the block. I mistook many things for many things. I still do. Even after I had spent years in pools, every single day, I thought that picture was taken underneath our kitchen while a hurricane washed across the island.

I was disappointed when I learned it was not.

...and I write to say that sometimes we all need to see beyond what is there...

Timing the Night

...I know my history. I come to this park to rehab the knee that I now feel swelling beneath the huge steel brace, but things that are gone fascinate me. I see dead people in my nightmares but even in the waking day I see long vanished buildings and places. And this park, well, long before it was a tomb for eleven thousand Revolutionary War soldiers and sailors killed in prisons by their British guards, it was a fort that Washington had tried to defend. And a hundred and fifty years before that losing battle I know that in the bay out there, in the bay beyond the fucking Farragut Houses, beyond the ancient brick Navy Yard wall, beyond all the old buildings and pierhouses and cranes where once a whole fleet of ships were launched to win the World War, beyond all that there were marshes thick with fish and oyster reefs and migrating ducks and pushing through a narrow channel a Dutch sailing ship arrived on a barely comprehended continent and dumped hired Flemish immigrants, Walloons they called them, to populate a new outpost in southern New Netherland.

If I work on it, especially in the settling dusk, I can see the woods and the deep green prairie that stretches to the tide line. And if I wait and let consciousness slip, sparks will start to fly from mud chimneys in the tiny cluster that will begin Breuckelen. Somehow, I know it is still out there.

I get up and begin to limp around, and though the Trade Center illuminates the night over there and the off-duty gun presses against my side under the big loose shirt and I am circling a Monument not built until 1908 in a park created in the 1860s I can find the seventeenth century. I watch those first Europeans pushing along the old Lenni Lenapi trade routes and creating tiny villages, Boswyk, Midwout, Nieuw Amersfort, Nieuw Utrecht, and Gravesend. Stumpy square-rigged ships drift through the harbor mixing with giant dugout canoes. The moon rises over an empire of trees...

...and I write to re-think memories...

Subway Map

On that weekend when they both disappeared from home, she with a black eye and he with a huge welt on his back where it had struck the radiator when he'd flown across the room, they pooled what money they had and split it mostly between his sock and her shoe and took the Number Six train down to Grand Central then the Seven over to Sixth then the D all the way to the end at Stillwell Avenue on Coney Island where neither had ever been. To celebrate escape they ate hot dogs at Nathan's and bought cokes and walked along the beach which was pretty empty on this early afternoon in early May. He told her he loved her and that they'd stay away forever and find jobs and live in one of those little houses they'd seen from the train that sat on walks not even streets and that, in their house, no one would ever hurt anybody. And the day turned into night and they actually found a twenty dollar bill in the sand plus a bunch of change and felt rich and had knishes and cream soda for dinner, splitting a cherry-cheese one for dessert, then curled up against a giant concrete support under the boardwalk...

And so I want everyone to write... and by "write" I mean to tell your stories. Stories are the way humans learn about each other and about the world. None of them are ever really "true," no, not even those labelled "non-fiction" by your teachers or by your library, but none of them are truly "fake" either, not even the craziest science fiction, they have come from genuine places in the minds of real people.

And if you do not tell your stories in a way that others can reach them - even others who have no idea who you are - you cast less of a shadow on this world and on our lives than you should. Because, we need your voice too... We need your dreams, your memories, your imaginings, and even your fears.

Because we are all important. And our stories are all important. And that's why I write, and that's why I want you to too.

- Ira Socol