In the life of any writer comes a time where one reflects back to those first moments of putting thoughts and feelings onto paper and having them read by another word-loving human being, but it’s always a bit murky as to when that instance occurred.  In a larger sense, did it originate in the clash of cultures between one’s intimate family and the extended world about us?  Possibly.  Or in speaking multiple languages as a child and trying to decipher meaning across tongues?  For a great number.  Or in the common knowledge of death or impermanence?  Yes, probably for most.  Or in that simple desire to entertain, to make a loved one laugh (for fear of crying) perhaps?  More often, the better.

Pablo Neruda, the master Chilean poet, in his autobiography Memoirs, notes that childhood moment when the mysterious hand of a next door neighbor, a boy about his own age, appeared through a hole in the hedge between their properties and placed a toy stuffed sheep into the perimeter of his backyard.  Not knowing why or wherefore, this silent physical act contained mystery, without words was too a seed for poetry.

For me did it begin with my first grade school poem, also set in a backyard, about the Loch Ness monster out to plague my two girl cousins?  Sent in a letter, it was read with some measure of glee not necessarily because my cousins loved literature, but perhaps because they became a part of literature, immortalized as figures within a play.  I recall too that lithe, younger student teacher in my high school sophomore year who substituted for the regular, booze-breathed English instructor and who praised my tiny poem about flashing stars seen after pressing palms against my eyelids.

There were other momentary sparks of word and response, vague calls to action and sustained effort, but it must have been in the summer of 1965 a few months later, with a teacher who went by the unlikely name of Saxton Pope III, grandson of the San Francisco physician who befriended Ishi, the last of the California Yahi Indians, and who chose to instruct a group of ingénues for six blessed weeks of creative writing.

In his class there was no room for shirk and jive, and yet neither was felt any pressure.  He gave a single writing prompt each weekday morning; then we wrote for several hours, finally sharing our morning’s efforts with our wide-eyed peers just before noon.  It was a kind of writer’s heaven without genre restriction nor word count, beginning sometimes with a single formal challenge like: End your piece with a inverted cliché, a routine popularized later as “freewriting.”  And there too, you experienced a built-in audience, of which you were a part for others.

It was perhaps a first sense of writing “community,” made up of classmates Curtis Fukuda, Roxanne Ozawa, Susan Edwards, Mark Cavallini and others, some of whom have gone on to publish books of their own, another to the visual arts, and one whose older brother died too young for his country in the paddies of Vietnam.  It was a voluntary ragtag group of teenage rebels, “nerds” before there was such a word, much less became a badge of cool, and it was in every sense self-affirming.  To discover that there were others thrilled by the art of writing, and that they could share that in same room with you.

In my mind, this is probably an idealized recall; in truth perhaps just a way of getting out of mowing the summer lawn or forsaking batting a red rubber baseball in the San Jose heat.  But it remains, real or imagined as memory can be, and I hope that you can experience it too.  Perhaps even here, some sense of the communal, or to create for it a space of your own.