Current mood:	committed
Current music:	Manifest Destiny - MC Lars & ytcracker

Writer's Manifesto
Today is my daughter's "blooming authors" party at school, where she will share her written opus with me. Accordingly, here is a piece on my own journey as a writer. This is a new revision of the piece I wrote for my executive self-summary in 2007.

Hello, my name is Deborah (Hello Deborah) and I have been a writer for… well…

I am always ambivalent about efforts to codify my personal narrative, but taking on an identity as a writer has been particularly challenging for me. I carry the weight of generations of writers and editors, and have only recently experimented with adding the self-described title to my load.

My family tree has been made into more books and articles than I can count. The paper trail starts in the radio newsroom at NBC, winds through the halls of the Reader’s Digest, and scatters to the wind across the shelves of university libraries and Barnes & Noble. My father’s entry in PubMed alone is exhausting, and as inspiring as my mother’s skill in distilling clarity from any source material. My sister is one of my favorite novelists, and the otherwise diverse roster of my aunts, uncles, step-parents and cousins are unified in a dedication to the written word.

From my earliest years I have composed music and lyrics, but never understood it to be writing. When my compositions were performed in school assemblies in kindergarten and elementary school I took it as validation of my identity as a singer. The time that my fourth grade after-school teacher requested that I perform a short story I had written on her college radio show seemed a fluke, and more likely related to her pity for a strange and friendless child.

As the turmoils of adolescence unfolded writing came suddenly as the desperate refuge from a series of traumatic events. I wrote in my journal to know that I was not crazy. I wrote in my journal to confirm that I was crazy. I wrote intense poetry that was not hyperbolic within the context of its inspiration. I wrote song after song after song to proclaim a self that was struggling to own its existence. I was not a writer, I was a survivor. I viewed the artistic merits of my creative production as suspect, but held onto their import as evidence of my life.

The earliest beginnings of my identity as a writer came from my academic classes. I took almost sensual pleasure in my ability to write a critical essay or research paper, to combine my gifts for insight and manipulation in creating a document that transformed thesis statements into intellectual evolutions. As yet ignorant of relativistic theory, I proclaimed great truths and their antitheses to be synchronously and equally valid. That, I was informed, was not the assignment.

By now, my identity as a non-writer was so entrenched that I ignored all evidence that would contradict my negative conviction. Encouragement to submit short stories to teen journals went unheeded and the success of my first play resonated more for its semi-autobiographical theme. When I performed the opening monologue for my audition at NYU’s school of musical theater, I heard their enthusiastic encouragement to apply to the writing program only as a slight to my abilities as an actress.

In college I met a writer who offered me both her friendship and unprecedented nourishment for the seeds of acceptance that were sprouting in my heart. She was and remains an inspiration in her use of poetic form and imagery, her ability to milk small syllables for the most poignant drops of truth. That she found worth in my creative writing and criticism was baffling, but opened a sense of possibility within me. During a time of great personal evolution we had endless conversations refining the metaphors of our experiences. My journaling transformed into personal essays and my poetry into manifesto.

In later years when our friendship lapsed and my marriage encroached upon my soul my writing dropped off. To regard myself through my own expression would have endangered the uneasy calm of denial with which I had enshrouded myself from my self. It was the therapeutic training that I underwent in massage school that finally re-cracked the door and allowed me to step through and re-assert my existence. As my strength in myself grew, my writing returned and my marriage failed.

Now the dust has begun to settle on my new life, and I have made but one resolution to keep for the remainder of my days, a mantra, a commandment and a celebration of all that I am, as one of the universe’s children:

Manifest like crazy.

So here I am, hopeful and anxious, tired and restless, but no longer searching for conviction.
Hello, my name is Deborah and I am a writer. Period.