#also had a rainbow belt on his bed so either he’s gay or I’ve somehow found another one

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my new flatmate just put raw uncooked spaghetti in a hot frying pan. no water. I can still smell it burning from my room. what

[excxt]

On Changing Direction, or The Statement of Purpose That Did Not Get Me Accepted Into Grad School.

I learned to write from a janitor when I was eleven years old.

He was thirty-something with an eyebrow ring and he coached the junior high boys’ basketball team. He had bright blond hair that fell over his ears in waves and he was tall, so tall that you could see him above the heads of students and teachers as he pushed a mop bucket of sudsy water through the halls at the end of a school day. His name was Bob.

I had a best friend named Lindsay and by the time we were in the sixth grade at that small Catholic school where Bob worked, in a quiet lower-middle class neighborhood outside Buffalo, we had become restless. We took to making up stories and inventing exotic characters who lived in big cities and played in rock bands. We wrote about things we had no idea of; suicides, drug abuse, gay sex, anything that broke the mold of our daily morning prayers and afternoon bus rides. We walked around the neighborhood after school and told these stories out loud, turning around every so often to make sure that the invisible gaggle of our characters was still trailing along behind us. After a while we began to use the blank pages at the backs of our school notebooks to keep track of them all. Their names, ages, hair colors, relationships and hobbies, and a brief synopsis of the lives we’d given them:

“Sully, 25. Green eyes, long dark dreadlocks. Lost his baby daughter in a flood and now lives in a cabin at the top of a hill in the woods because he’s afraid of the rain.”

One day after school Lindsay and I were sitting in the empty cafeteria whispering and scheming over our notebooks when Bob came in with the pusher broom that looked like a giant cloth caterpillar. He stopped and leaned on the broomstick when he saw us there.

“Are you girls writing?” he asked.

“Sort of.”

That was all he needed to hear.

Besides being a janitor and a basketball coach, Bob was also a poet, a frequent contributor of work to national magazines and an active member of the local writing scene. When he caught us planning ways to torture and subsequently redeem our list of characters that day in the cafeteria, he was working on his first collection of poems, to be published later that year.

Bob immediately took us under his wing, giving us copies of his newest poems on sheets of computer paper. They were flowing rhythmic pulses of spoken art that I didn’t always understand but loved nonetheless. He gave us each a notebook, spiral bound with a rainbow colored peace sign on the thin cardboard cover, that was to be used for writing only; Bob told us that our stories should have a place of their own, not crammed into the back of a notebook filled with math problems or history definitions. But even those empty notebooks didn’t last long. All we did was write, during class or silent reading time, scribbling away at our desks, pausing to chew the end of a pen while our classmates either stared, glazed over, out the windows, or studied diligently and put their heads down when they were finished. During each lunch period Lindsay and I would trade off notebooks and see what each other’s characters had gotten up to. When each story was finished we would hand them off to Bob, who would quickly return them with pages of red-inked suggestions and praise.

“Explain this further- why such hostility between father and son?”

“Love the description of the summer house on the lake- you truly are a poet!”

He spoke of us to writer friends of his, sometimes sharing our stories after we gave him our flushed and flattered permission, and later that year, when he gave us our own copies of his collection of poems, we found our names included in the short list of acknowledgements:

“To Erin and Lindsay, my prolific proteges.”

We stayed in touch with Bob after moving on to high school, trading pages through the mail in stuffed manila envelopes. He edited and released two collections of poetry from writers from all over the city, including two pieces of mine in each. By the time the second volume came out I was in college in Boston, studying music and devoting all my time to playing, listening and songwriting. I began to study CD lyric sleeves as though they were books, digging through the rhymes and imagery to find stories. I began to keep a journal of essays chronicling my new life in a new city, keeping meticulous track of everything I saw and everyone I met. I felt the stories swirling around my head like autumn leaves caught in a cyclone wind and, after I’d practiced my scales and arpeggios, I hurried to my notebook to get the details down on paper.

A few months later I graduated and moved from Boston to Brooklyn to New Jersey and finally to Nashville. In those years I have been a hostess, a barista, and a recording engineer. I’ve worked in kitchens and grocery stores, in offices and malls. I’ve spent some overnights folding denim in the middle of Manhattan and others cleaning bathrooms in the largest recording studio in the country. I’ve had ten different zip codes in nine years. I have taken a lot of buses, a lot of trains, and a lot of notes. It is true that during much of this time I’ve felt aimless. I’ve felt like a failure and a wanderer. I have questioned, sometimes frantically, everything I had believed to be my strengths, everything I had thought I was meant to do.  But through it all, I have always kept writing. I’ve scribbled in notebooks on subways and texted paragraphs to myself walking down city streets, my fingers working feverishly while I tried to avoid hitting street lamps. I have gone home to one tiny apartment or another and pulled up new documents on the computer screen, written essays and stories about the ways in which I’d been moved, and somehow getting it out of my head through the movement of my hands has always encouraged me to keep going.

During the lowest part of my post-undergrad journey I was living in a mouse and horsefly infested apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. I was half-heartedly going to job interviews at music houses and studios and taking two connecting trains into Manhattan to work full time at Gap. I went home every night and made a plate of spaghetti and butter, sitting on my twin sized bed and thinking about all the people I had seen that day and the endless stories and supporting characters that each of their lives offered. I marvelled at the smallness of myself in the midst of them and, simultaneously, how essential I was. How essential each person was in an unfathomable web of relationships and of cause and effect. It was at this lowest point that I decided I had nothing left to lose. I gathered up the stories of the people that I’d known, some for decades, some only briefly, and began to write a novel.

That novel, Rooms of The House, is about a family in the modern American rust belt, its members dealing with mental illness, bankruptcy and foreclosure, and the acceptance of each other and themselves. It tells of daughter Margot’s journey from her hometown to new cities, from her childhood friends to the colorful cast of her early twenties, and how each place and each person plays a role in helping her realize that there are some things that cannot be changed.

I know that there are still more stories for me to tell, the imagined lives of the thousands of strangers’ faces I have passed along my way: The woman who asked for a sample of decaf at my coffee shop just to have an excuse to talk to someone for a while. A landlord in Boston who I once walked in on as she cried on the phone in German. That man with the scar on the subway. That pair of kids in the street. And after taking miles of winding and crooked paths, I see my own story laid out straight in front of me. After years of wandering, I have finally allowed myself to hear what  Bob the janitor told that eleven-year-old girl. I remember once when he handed back one of the notebooks I gave him to be filled with his remarks and suggestions I saw that he had written something in bold red letters on the blank inside cover, a testimony I am finally ready to take heed of: “YOU ARE A WRITER.”