On Her Writing

From a handwritten journal entry; probably responses to interview questions. Age 14 years.

1. I'm very interested in rollerskating and am on a speed skating team that meets once a week.

I spend a lot of time listening to music, either on the radio or on my record player, and I love hard and soft rock. I dislike disco and popular "top 40" songs.

I've been working on identifying wildflowers and edible plants for the last few years. I enjoy going on walks in different areas and trying to name as many plants as I can.

My mother and I "collect" animals. Over the summer we have visitors like snakes, turtles, baby rabbits, birds, mice, and bats. Either we find them injured and try to save them, or we catch them and then let them go.

2. As far as poetry goes, Robert Frost, Longfellow, and Edna St. Vincent Millay were my favorites when I was younger, but lately I'm much more fond of Edna St. Vincent Millay than the other two. All three have interesting meter and rhyme but Millay uses interesting blank verse and expresses many of the things that I've felt at different times.

I found the book Shardik by Richard Adams and all of Stephen King's books exciting. The characters were made to seem very real.

Ray Bradbury also has had a special impact on my writing. I love his images, his imagination, and the way he builds suspense. I would like to write poetry the way Bradbury writes prose.

3. I don't admire any contemporary or historical "figures". I admire a lot of friends of the family and friends of mine.

4. I went to a wilderness camp in Georgia last summer and that gave me ideas for Almost Enough. I thouht of Wilderness Vision while I was out weeding in our flower garden and rushed in to write it down. I got out of my 1 hour of weeding for that day!

I read it to myself and copied it over a couple times until I was satisfied with it and then showed it to my mother. She suggested I change "wild, laughing confetti" to "wildly laughing confetti" which both of us liked much better. (That's the only word change my parents, or anyone, suggested in the three poems.)

I wrote Almost Enough while at school. It's about my feelings when remembering standing on top of a rock, getting ready to rappel down it. The poem is also about my view of how God, if he exists, must feel about earth. If He created this planet, I'm certain he's unable to change it now.

Maybe the earth was too complicated a project and after God finished it, set it in motion, and men mutliplied, His project got out of hand. The rock seems too great to have been placed there by anyone but a supernatural being, but it also seems too great, too full of past and past and past to be altered, even by God. God flies away from the cliff, in awe of what he's done, and remembers, longingly, a time when He still could change the earth, a dream of dinosaur bones. (The dinosaur may also be a part of the cliff.) The grey hawk is God. "To look off the edge is to be a bird" hints that the "we" in the poem are somehow birdlike, created in His image. "It was almost enough ... and all you've done is try for perfection" is about the imperfections in the world, that God has almost enough power to set right. And when I refer to Him as "my God", I mean the God that I can imagine. Certainly not many people would agree with my view of God, and I don't think I believe in Him either. I thought it was an interesting idea. It took about three drafts to get it just the way I wanted it.

"Quest" was inspired by "The Last Unicorn" by Peter S. Beagle. I wasn't at all interested in unicorns until I read that book, but after I had, and let it set in my mind, I was able to write "Quest" one day in school. It's not only about a search for a unicorn but the quest for anything one wants. A person can search years for one thing and have to settle in the end for only a glimpse of the dream. Sometimes that's enough.