In the Courtyard -- Margaret's Bench

Margaret's Bench -- February 2010

In last month’s Bench, I told about expecting to grow up to be a teacher when I was a kid—a teacher of my current school grade, whatever that happened to be. All through childhood I thought I’d be a teacher when I grew up, except for one moment of epiphany at the age of ten, when I had an surprising vision of myself as a writer in my middle years. That vision—too wonderful, it seemed, to be true—quickly faded from conscious mind. I kept on thinking I’d be a teacher someday.

Near the end of high school, encouraged by my English teacher Shearl Edler (and without that 10-year-old vision in my mind at all), I began to wonder if I might turn into both a teacher and a writer. That would be cool.

So with those dreams in mind, after matriculating at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, I signed up for Milton White’s creative writing classes, and continued to take them, year after year until graduation. I hoped to set out on the road to publication, but my real motivation for taking the classes was that they were so much fun. Under Mr. White’s gentle and pointed wit, I learned how to take criticism from my peers, and even how to laugh at myself now and then—vital lessons for any young writer.

And yet, I could not make the turn from hope to publication at that time in my life. Maybe my own self-definition was just too narrow. I saw myself as a future famous novelist, not a future star reporter, or even best-selling nonfiction book writer. No, I was an artist. So I didn’t take journalism classes, missing the chance to learn about one kind of professional writing that actually gets some ink and earns a steady wage at the same time.

For different reasons, I also avoided poetry-writing classes. Confident in prose and uncertain in verse, I was frankly chicken to show my poems alongside those of others who seemed to know what they were doing. So I missed out on getting to know Rita Dove, future Poet Laureate of the United States, who graduated from Miami with a degree in English the same year I did. It’s likely we met, but I don’t remember knowing her at all. Darn it.

I did send one of my short stories to Inklings, the college literary magazine, and was shocked when the editor politely declined to publish it.


	(I went by "Peggy" back then.)

Rather than sending him something else, or even reading a single edition of that rag from cover to cover, I gathered together a small group of friends and we started our own literary magazine, The Mandrake Root. We put up fliers asking for submissions, evaluated what came in, and sent out our acceptances and rejections. I liked that part of it.

The English Department let us use a steno machine to create the edition, and I typed the masters myself. Then we stood around campus and sold copies for 25 cents apiece. We even managed to put out a second issue before internal politics in the small group and the sheer weight of work involved in starting a new periodical overwhelmed us. Like so many small magazines before it, The Mandrake Root came into being and folded within a single academic year.

I sent a short story to Seventeen magazine and received it back months later with a form rejection folded inside.

Today I know all this was a perfectly normal progression for a young writer. The series of rejections. Trying one thing and then trying something else. That’s the way it works. But somehow I found these experiences way too convincing. I started figuring odds—what were the odds that I would “make it” as a writer? Small, it seemed to me. Really, really small. This imaginary fact got really, really big in my mind.

So, I thought, maybe I wouldn’t be a teacher and a writer after all. Maybe I would just be a teacher. Which was fine! The plan from the beginning.

Except, of course, I no longer saw myself as a high school teacher. Instead, I realized, my destiny was to be a college professor of English.

So I kept up my grades, applied to grad schools, and got accepted at Ohio University with a teaching assistantship. In graduate school, finally, I would have the chance to do what I was always meant to do—teach for a living.

This month, on Ash Wednesday, we step from the season of Epiphany—the season of stars and signs, dreams and visions, journeys and unexpected turns on the road—into Lent. Lent is sometimes called a time for repentance and return to God. But because it turns out that we can’t find our right relationship with the Creator until our feet are on the ground, Lent becomes a time for facing our true selves—our essential humanity and our mortal earthiness.

On Ash Wednesday, we come to the place where dreams and visions intersect with the dust of life.