Alls I do is read and write

I know nobody is going to feel sorry for me (and you shouldn't), but I've learned that if you teach creative writing in a four week format you are immersed in writing and reading. Well, I don't do much work at night, but Jeez it's summer, sort of. So on days like today when I have to start reading and writing immediately, I think I'll bore you with excerpts from the roughest of rough drafts of my memoir. I don't really know what it is I'm writing about yet; don't tell my students. But I'm writing. Here goes . . .

My sister likes to put it this way: “you were just such a brat.” She doesn’t say this with any rancor or resentment, no exclamation mark necessary. It’s more a statement of fact delivered in a matter of fact way that really says it all. When we have these conversations about my childhood, I always wind up putting up my best defense; I was just a really high strung, skitterish, no let’s face it downright scared kid. My mother likes to muse about the metamorphosis that I seemed to undergo as a plane took off one summer and took both of us to Idaho to visit my brother. At the end of that summer only one of us returned to New Jersey, and I, the youngest and far too dependent Murphy child stayed behind.

At fifteen years old I wanted out. Out of New Jersey, which seemed a place with no identity and plenty of ways to get into trouble. The towns full of sameness, the suburban adolescence with no opportunity for part time work, the friends who were starting their various explorations into drugs, alcohol and sex all seemed like a recipe for disaster. I was no star at the large suburban high school I attended, excelling only in poetry and literature classes, failing miserably at algebra and physical education. I had great friends, but we were all glued together by problems and drama. We scorned the generations that had come before us for their naivety, but didn’t really understand the world we occupied. It was a time full of no big questions and not enough to think about, and we may have been the first generation of American kids to have too much unsupervised time on our hands, some of us with mothers who worked. We were adrift in an ocean that had no swells but wasn’t really placid either. We were 1970’s Jersey kids. In some ways, that says it all.


Betcha can't wait for the next installment, huh? Boy, writing when you have to is hard. I get a few pages one day, a few paragraphs the next. I found myself looking at the McCall, Idaho webcam so I could get details for my piece. In doing so I learned that nothing happens in McCall, Idaho.

Gotta go.
Gotta write.