BARBARA CAN'T WRITE

I am not write. i cannot write. i am 15 years old, 16 years old, 17 years old. i am convinced of this. this is what i have learned most powerfully from my scholing. fear and a strong sense of inadequacy as a writer. i am good at grammar lessons and spelling. i am the tallest girl in the class and the end of the spelling bee i am still standing. victorius. but essays bewilder me. each time i am assigned an essay i panic. i read and reread, make notes and agonise. i have no idea what to write or how to get started. i find no help in advice that tells me to write a plan first and follow it . when teachers require me to submit the plan, i first write the essay and do the plan later. how else do i know what i am going to essay? but i feel this is cheating - further evidence of my failure to get it right. never does it occur to me there may be something wrong it teh advice.

i am overwhelmed by the pressure to get it right. i am a perfectionist and i know the pathetic whimpering that lands on my page for what it is,pathetic. and so inevitably i find my self starring in a scence which goes like this. the setting is the kitchen table. the paper is due the next day. it is getting later and later, and my mother is in the kitchen. she may be reading the paper or finishing the new york times crossword as she smokes. i sit at the table and start to cry. i don't know what to write. and so my mother, once a teacher herself, begins to ask me questions. what is the essay about ? what do i know about the topic ? well could i  say...? and how about ...? her words are long gone but as she speaks i write her words down-as many as i can. later i fill in the gaps, make the links. and little by little the essay takes shape. i know that if  i sit there long enough and cry long enough, she will write the essay for me and alleviate the fear that imprisons my words.

these many years later it's the gold-sprinkled formica table i remember, the hum of the dishwasher, and my mother's soft crooning, 'could you say this and that?' i came to believe my mother wrote my essays. i had no notion then of the legitimacy of collaborationor of scaffolding the writing of the less experienced. my first year at university, a five hour drive from my home, i read  my george orwell's on shooting an elephant and was required to write a one - page essay. i stayed up all night. i cried and ate and submitted a pathetic effort to my tutor at my saturday 8:00 a.m class and failed. the torturred freshan failed her first essay. ever. confirmation that she cannot write without her mother.

were my mother alive she would smile at the irony of her daughter wrtig a book on teaching writing. the daughter who knew she could not write. my passion as a writing teacher finds its genesis in that failure - and in the help of those teachers who eventually showed me i could write.