Revision as a Shield

Mr. Tillman, my high school AP English Teacher and dearly remembered mentor, once revised a poetry piece I wrote comparing the death and decline of my addict-mother to a Californian palm tree that had been planted in cold Minnesota soil. I remember handing it to him, handwritten on a torn out piece of notebook paper, between classes, though I do not remember why. It was, like the majority of my compositions, not an assignment but a voluntary work of passion. I had never shared my poetry with him, or any teacher, before that day.

            The first time I got in trouble for writing was when I was nine or ten years old. I read and wrote voraciously, keeping intimate journals about my daily horrors and filling pretty notebooks with what I hoped was inspiring poetry. When we moved to Minnesota from California, I was already traumatized as: half an orphan, often homeless, sexually and physically abused, and fleeing my mother’s legal problems. I considered myself a scrupulous and moral person with a deep connection to spirituality, but I was also acting out in the expected, inappropriate ways. My journal was a tell-all expose of the daily life of a neglected child, including sexual exploits with local neighborhood boys and experiments with cigarettes and alcohol alongside older cousins. My mother, though generally incapacitated, read and reacted to one such notebook in such a violent, memorable way that revision was forevermore imbedded into my writing process as a measure of self-protection.

            The first poem I ever wrote was called Smoke, Smoke, Smoke, about how my eyes burned and watered due to the clouds of smoke my mother and her friends produced while drinking beers and listening to loud music late into the night. I composed it, and my other earliest pieces, in a floral, spiral-bound notebook with the Serenity Prayer printed on the cover – a relic from my mother’s most recent stint in rehab. Like every piece in that first book, Smoke, Smoke, Smoke began as a testament to suffering but ended with, in this case, a literal and figurative clearing of thought and space. I realized through this form of expression, I could both relieve and inspire myself . . . without the fear of retribution, thanks to heavy-handed metaphorical usage.

            So my poetry was freeform, but my journals were live-revised (and heavily guarded) analysis of the impossible situation that was my daily life. Honesty, I found, was a way of maintaining control. When I told the truth, which was always, I was empowered. I wrote the narrative. My journals were ripe with AXES as I struggled to understand and interpret my life and the characters in it. I included quotes from angry or drunk adults, examples of how their behaviors affected me, context (to be fair to all involved), and my signature inspirational take on how I would one day be free of it.

            Mr. Tillman once flew to Atlanta with me to accept the prestigious, National First Amendment Award for exemplary, boundary-pushing, uncensored journalism as the Editor-in-Chief of my high school newspaper, The Wolfpack Press. I was a high achiever. But I historically kept my poetry to myself, both afraid of being seen in my vulnerability and convinced of my own obscurity. One day, near the end of my high school career, I handed Mr. Tillman what I felt was an overly-long Ode to How I Became – the poem about my mother, the palm tree.

            All he added was punctuation.