Begone, Jeannie Batterham!
Lots of writers will tell you they started writing stories, poems, plays when they were seven. Or maybe seven and a half. Eight at the outside.
Not me. I was too afraid of Jeannie Batterham.
Jeannie was the cutest, funniest, smartest, most popular girl in first, second, third and fourth grade at Mary W. French Elementary School in Decatur, Illinois. A tiny bundle of effervescence next to my lumbering, oversized self. As long as you were welcome in Jeannie’s posse you were golden. Getting crosswise of her? Not a good idea.
And Jeannie owned Creativity. She wanted to be an actress. (I moved away after fourth grade – but when I Googled her I found that she’d played lead roles right through college.) She was crazy talented at drawing and painting. And she always knew the best books to read – The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, The Secret Garden, A Little Princess.
At Jeannie’s house we wore her two fluffy tulle skirts to become fairy queens, ballerinas, princesses. I loved those skirts but I never asked my mom for one of my own. There was no real reason not to – I had plenty of toys and dolls – but somehow I knew that a garment that invited you into fantasy was for Jeannie, not for me.
Jeannie lived five blocks from school, and I lived one block closer. This was in the Prepedophilia Era, when kids still walked to school, and everyday I’d walk back a block, pick Jeanne up, and we’d walk together. Read that two sentences again. Yeah, you got it.
I walked an extra two blocks for her everyday, until the day I didn’t – because I was late and I was sure she’d already gone on. Which I explained when I got to school. Jeannie was not appeased.
For days afterward Jeannie led a mob of kids after me all the way home, chanting “crazy, kooky, clumsy Carolyn!” over and over. And not just third graders. Her brother was in fifth grade, so her spell held sway well beyond Mrs. Haskell’s class.
Finally I told my mother, and she talked to Mrs. Batterham, and the next day Jeannie acted like nothing whatsoever had happened. Like we were and had always been besties.
All this because I didn’t pick her up one day. How might she punish me for trying to write stories – for daring to plant my flag in a tiny plot of land in Queen Jeannie’s Realm of Imagination? There be dragons.
In ninth grade I finally said out loud that I wanted to be a writer – in front of my whole Civics class, for our “What do you want to be when you grow up?” presentation. Note that I didn’t say “novelist,” just “writer.” I was nearly 1000 miles away from Jeannie by then, in northern Minnesota, but apparently she’d gotten a grip on me like one of those monster-centipede things that alien invaders use to control their human slaves. You know, the slimy creatures that slither onto your spine and then dig in – and when they die, you do, too.
So. Writer-but-not-novelist. Won high school essay contests, majored in English at Carleton College, wrote for its newspaper and alumni magazine, interned for the local weekly paper, TA’ed for writing classes, got an entry level editorial job at a weird trade magazine. Which was deeply unfulfilling and paid diddly-squat.
Exchanged my keyboard for an MBA and marketing job and plumbed new depths of unfulfillment, but at three times my previous salary. Until the phone rang one day and a friend told me one of our college classmates had just died of a brain aneurysm. At 27.
The Realm of the Imagination grabbed the back of my head and slammed my face onto my desk once, twice, three times. “Stop. Wasting. Time!” It paused for breath. And then again, “Start. Writing. Novels!”
All that face slamming must have loosened Jeannie’s grip
So. Novelist. Now I have an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Hamline University, many years of experience writing just about everything besides fiction, AND one completed middle grade novel, a YA on its fourth draft, and two more in earlier stages of completion.
A few days ago I learned (through Facebook, where else?) that a 44-year-old friend just died of lupus.
I’m not wasting any more time on the Jeannies of the world.