Trace Words
In college, I earned money doing all sorts of jobs. I was paying my way through school, paycheck by paycheck. I was a bartender and short order cook at an on-campus pub at Ohio State called JR Miggs. I worked 5 days a week, nights and weekends, slinging Budweiser and frying reubens and eggs. We had a regular crew of professors and students hell bent on destroying their bodies one mug at a time.
I donated my body to science when I lived for a year abroad, taking drugs (beta blockers or placebo, I don’t know which) so that big pharma could measure the results.
The summer before I went to college, I scraped and painted a single house from about 8AM to noon. Then I went home, took a nap and proceeded to work a night shift at McDonald’s cooking until midnight. At closing time I turned the lights off on the drive-thru, scraped the grills, emptied the grease trap and mopped the floors. I did this every day for three months straight. After every workday, I took a long shower and watched as paint chips and grease washed down the drain. Every night I collapsed into bed.
I worked hard and put myself through school, as the cliche goes. I wasn’t afforded many advantages, being the son of a writer, but I did know this: before the world would ever stand a moment paying for anything I wrote (or built or photographed or recorded), I would have my own dues to pay. He was quoting someone before him when he said it, I think.
Dad wanted me to be clear that writing is apprenticework that begins many years before you even know you’re working. Writing has many bosses, and if I were to decide I wanted to take up the family business — letters — then he wasn’t, for good reason, going help. Period. End of discussion.
I went on to become a software engineer.
I only delayed by twenty years what I knew was my calling. During the intervening decades, I wrote very little. Not creatively anyway. That is, I did not write stories or essays but I did write letters to friends and colleagues. Typing for a living and writing for a living are not just stylistically but spiritually different beasts. There is creativity in engineering, sure. But at the end of the day, software works or it doesn’t. The appeal of that cold truth had its undeniable appeal.
Until it didn’t.
One of the jobs I had during my senior year in college was reading newspapers, magazines and short stories for my parents’ realtor, Maggie. Maggie was swiftly losing her vision as a result of a disease, the nature of which I never asked. She was trying furiously to learn how to read by touch and in the meantime, what else could she do? This was in an era when audio books could be checked out of the library and you could get the The Columbus Dispatch on a secret channel on the radio, but you could not listen to The New Yorker or an up-and-coming writer whose works were not yet housed on 6 or 7 compact discs.
So I sat in my bedroom Sunday night every week with a stack of reading material that I picked up from the library. Books and magazines Maggie told me to pick up. She gave me a voice recorder and that was my work: reading what others had written.
I pressed record and read. The recorder sat on my chest as I lay in bed reading aloud from Capote and Cather or someone I didn’t recognize from our bookshelves at home. By reading aloud I was discovering new voices and old ones. I was even practicing my own. I got paid $15/hour which was a tidy sum back then, twice what I was making in tips tending bar. Unlike manual labor, reading was hard work and I couldn’t manage more than an hour-and-a-half at a time, enough for two to three short works, then I’d pass out, exhausted and ready to start the week. I did this until I graduated. I would have continued if Maggie hadn’t died.
The year she died I was the voice in her ear. I have often thought of that. Having someone read to you as your sight fades and your body gives up. Many years later, I would read to my mother as she lay dying in hospice, repeating the cycle and firming up my belief that a life lived by letters is life well earned. At that time, I had just sold my company and was glad that mom could see me achieve success as an entrepreneur. Starting a company and succeeding is a kind of creative work and if done right can be a beautiful and lasting work. The pains of which are different enough for their satisfaction. Even she cautioned me against being a writer. But being in business? Go for it.
Though I fell short of my own demands, I had fought and won and provided enough steam for myself to take on new ventures. One day, soon, I’d take up the family business.
Stories, not books.
Coming from a writer’s family, the first books I decided to publish were my dad’s. The licensing came easy, which was nice. But converting them from print to ePub was something else. I like to learn by doing so I scanned dad’s books by hand, then converted them with OCR software. Then I did the painstaking work of tracing each of the words in his stories from the printed page to the digital copy making sure that there were no mistakes. That kind of copyediting would make most readers tear their eyeballs out. But if you’re a writer — both a son and a wannabe, walking a pace behind and stretching out each step — it’s a rare opportunity to learn.
Around this time my first son was born. The doctor had no words of advice to give us except for this: “read out loud to your boy.” Studies have shown verbal ability is related to how much time you spend reading with your kids. Even as infants, they need to hear your words. So I would read The New Yorker to David, him propped up by a protective layer of pillows in the middle of the bed and me by his side, dutifully parenting the only way I knew how.
Paying your dues. Tracing words. Reading out loud from the greats. Reading to an audience of one. This is how you find your voice.
If anything this is what Great Jones Street brings to Medium — a place where any writer, at any stage, can pay their dues — is access to writers who have more than their stories at stake here.
As a gift, here’s one of my dad’s stories, “Sweet Cheeks.” It’s my favorite. I traced it myself.
Enjoy.
— K
