Adults in the Room

In the spring of my sophomore year in high school I took a writing class at an evening extension program. I was the only teenager in the class, and I didn’t really enjoy it, but when one of the other students contacted me the next fall to see if I wanted to be a part of a writing group, I thought, “Why not?” We met in the apartment of one of the writers, which was in the same large complex to which my father had moved after my parents divorced. There was a sameness to all those apartments, and arriving at the first meeting I had a sense that this is where every adult in Providence went when they were in between marriages or careers.

We sat around in a circle in the living room, some on the floor, some in chairs, and read our work to each other. Once again, I was the only teenager in the room. To that point in my life, most of the groups I had been a part of were those where children outnumbered adults. If I did find myself with a pack of grownups, I sensed an allowance being made for my presence. This was not the case that night.

There was a tattooed man with a large mustache who explained that he wrote “street poetry,” about heroin addiction and his time in Vietnam. Another man shared a poem called “Mother Fucker” about the sexual abuse he’d suffered as a boy. A woman read an essay about her sexless marriage. I had brought along a cool story about a ghost in a castle. I read it, but it seemed out of place. What’s really going on here? I wondered. There was a lot of grief and anxiety being shared, but not much about writing itself.

I bagged on it after the second meeting. I didn’t want to hear about their adult problems. Also, I didn’t like thinking of writers as a bunch of messed up, frustrated, depressed loners. Why wasn’t anybody in that room happy? Why was that never a part of the story? Isn’t happiness reality too? Adulthood seemed tough, a writing career seemed daunting, but I resolved then that there would be joy somewhere in everything I wrote because I was not interested in living a life without it.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write With Confidence.
You can find William at: williamkenower.com