When I was in first grade, we were asked to write a story. I scrawled sixty-some pages of stories, and crayon illustrations. My teacher wrote her only comment on the last page, “I don’t think all of these are completely original.” Obviously, she had never heard of mimetic instruction. 

In my ninth-grade world civilizations class, we had a particularly difficult question to answer at the end of one chapter. The other students simply didn’t answer it, but one classmate and I grappled with the question in study hall until we came up with a plausible answer. We wrote our answers individually, but they were, not surprisingly, similar. The teacher accused us of cheating. He snarled at me, “You rummy dummy,” and paddled me in front of the class. 

In eleventh grade, my creative writing teacher gave us an assignment to write a soap opera. I wrote what I knew: the tears and trials that went on behind closed doors on the street where I grew up. His only comment was, “This is not believable.”

During my first year of college, I won an award for an essay I wrote in response to Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium Is the Message.” My mother saw the essay and was enraged because one line alluded to unrealistic sitcoms in which parents never got drunk. 

During my second year of college, I took an independent study with poet Annetta Jefferson. She dropped one of my poems in the trash. “Where it belongs,” she emphasized.

Why didn’t I toss my typewriter in the trash with my college poem? 

Some things burn inside me until I set them on paper. When I write, I’m not just word processing; I am prayer processing. I often start crushed by the Fall but end with my writing fingers inked with the joys of Christ. Writing is one way I wrestle my soul into submission to God. I write because my face is in the mud near the ford of the Jabbok, but the God who came down meets me in the muck. It’s been a long night, but day is breaking. My hip is out of joint, but I have God’s blessing as I limp, pen in hand, toward a better city.