The Writer in the Toenail Clippings

You see I can’t write.

When I start, I think, well, I’m not this writer or that writer.

(Add the names here of any writers you aspire to be like—or would be willing to collect their toenail clippings in a jar, having been told all word inspiration comes directly from writers’ toenail clippings, and how handy that would be for you, not overlooking the go green aspect of writer toenail recycling).

I am not this writer or that writer. I am me writer—me writer who does not get published except once every ten years—me writer who doesn’t deliver such polished and coiffed words that make the buying public swarm into the bookstore for that fresh-inked smelling first edition.

So I don’t start writing because I’m a me writer. And I don’t know how to get over being me and not being one of them—the known ones—the writers whose words I read and wish I was Spongebob Squarepants so I could actually absorb each delicate parcel of their writings “like a sponge.”

Me writer, just trying to be funny.

And I can be funny, you see, as me writer I can be anything I want. It doesn’t matter. Even though I taught oodles of college freshman about composition and how much their written story “mattered,” and even though I believed it with all the sponginess of my heart, I cannot seem to translate that into what one does with their story once they write it down.

If it is so important for us to write down our stories or they will be lost forever, then what are we supposed to do once we take a writing chance, get the truth on paper and still no one cares any more than “before” we wrote it down?

Thinking back on those days of my trying to convey to those 25 sets of eyes how crucial their story was to the world, it seems like I was telling the “little white lie of writing.” The truth is—their story and the story of countless me writers like me—doesn’t matter after all.

Yet, each semester I could always see the importance of story in my students’ eyes before they ever tried to find their writer’s voice on the page.

The first day of class, I could see how they wanted me to know them—not in the usual stuffy English professorial kind of way—but in the can-you-lend-me-a-helping-hand kind of way because life is hard sometimes and I’m afraid.

I could see the fear stories in the eyes of these newbie composition geniuses when they opted for this seat or that one, or the one in the far back where they thought they would never be called on to be real.

They never thought they’d be called on to be real, and I never intended to be The Velveteen Rabbit of composition, but I craved real words from the inside of my students’ souls.

Their eyes told me. Their names told me. What they did or didn’t wear told me—what they would or wouldn’t say told me how much they needed to put on paper.

My job was to pull their Velveteen Rabbit words out of the holes where they hid who they really were.

Right now, I’m trying to remember how I managed to do that in the classroom so I can re-teach myself the world needs as many Velveteen Rabbit words and me writers as it can get.

And yes, it does sound like I’m a whiny writer and yes I can do that as much as I want—I have this collection on my mantle of tiny jars filled with toenail clippings I bought on ebay from the likes of Elizabeth Gilbert, Sue Monk Kidd and Lorrie Moore to back up the inspiration behind my words.