One
of the things I love most about teaching writing is hearing from former
students and seeing what their writing life is like. Here’s a lovely piece by a
student who was in one of my workshops at the Writer’s
Center, back in the olden days, and what I love most about reading this is
that it echoes exactly what I like to say: It is NEVER too late to write. All
you need to do is…start.
The Leather
Journal
By
Ryan Krausmann
My
wife knows me to be a writer. She knows
I graduated from college with a degree in Creative Writing. She knows I took
time off between jobs in my twenties to write a novel which was never published
or workshopped. She knows I talk about
wanting to be a writer. She just never
saw me doing any writing in the three and half years we have been
together.
Maybe
she wanted to change that. For our one
year anniversary in 2015, my wife got me a present – a small leather journal. It’s a present many writers probably
receive. Leather journals are beautiful things
when they are blank and my first irrational fear is that I would hate to fill
it up with poor, meandering writing.
This
pretty collection of paper forces you to write by hand. After a few days of writing I decided on a
pattern – every day I would write two pages on a different character. As the days went on I freed myself from that
initial irrational fear – dirtying a perfectly clean journal with my weakly
written words. An empty journal untouched
in a closet is like a nice leather jacket – it is meant to be used and to be
among the elements.
I
didn’t write every single day. I was
able to get writing done on Saturdays and Sundays. On weeknights, I sometimes got around to
writing at night after work and while my wife was cooking dinner. I’d go into the bedroom, get my pen and
journal from my nightstand, come over to the couch or leather chair, and I dove
right into it. Let the words come out.
What I have experienced in my life since the
last time I did any writing several years earlier was being put into words –
marriage, relationships, and being a man in his thirties. Again, the only goal when I sat down to write
was to complete two pages. I liberated myself
and my psyche by not producing writing that I would re-read or re-write, or at
least not re-read or re-write immediately.
I wrote like some would walk around their neighborhood at sunset –
solely for the brisk act itself, to collect and articulate thoughts, to be
reflective, and to find joy in the simple act.
I spent some small amount of minutes of my day doing something I enjoyed
- something I have always told myself and others that I enjoyed doing. And then, I closed the journal, put the cap
on the pen, and put the journal back on my nightstand.
I
wrote from March 1, 2015 to the journal’s completion on January 23, 2016. I plan to sit down soon and re-read it in its
entirety. Maybe with a glass of red wine
in one hand. The leather journal has a
first draft of something in there.
ABOUT: Ryan Krausmann
and his wife live in Sausalito, California. He graduated with a BA
in English from the University of Central Florida in 2002.