Stone Walls
Personal essays. That’s a good way to begin, so the books say, write what you know. Uh oh. If, by some miracle, they’re published, my siblings will read them. Perhaps there was therapeutic value for me to write about the red clay pigs Mother
sculpted. She discovered them broken and I let my younger sister and brother take the blame. I’ll just file it away. Later I find said siblings don’t even remember the incident.
I decide to write about happier times.
The gravel hurt my feet on a school field trip when I was in first grade and my older sister let me wear her sandals. Mother, a wonderful seamstress, remade the charity box clothes we wore so they fitted us. Unfortunately, that inspirational magazine I sent them to wasn’t interested in “The Sandals” or “The Second-Hand Easter Dress” or even “The Bridge”, which told how I overcame my fear of driving across a narrow bridge.
I still think the subjects were great. Maybe, perish the thought, my amateurish writing was the problem.
Southern Living showed some interest in a general nostalgia piece about my southern upbringing, said they’d get back to me. They didn’t. I keep the essays in a loose collection, adding one when a memory won’t let go of me. Maybe one day I’ll write that book on coming of age in the red dirt fields of Georgia.
I tried straight short stories. But editors didn’t care for a young woman who found out she was adopted after her mother’s death and searched for her older sister. My sister-in-law loved it though. My story about the fighting sisters must still languish in an editor’s forgotten files. I never heard from him/her.
In between, I entered stories in contests, including the Writer’s Digest competitions. Not even a 2nd or 3rd place. Would a sane person keep beating her head against a stone wall of rejection? If not for my family’s encouragement (and threats that if I didn’t keep on writing they’d disown me) I might have given up.
That mysterious boarded-up house down the street from my workplace presented an intriguing setting. But the novel bogged down after a few chapters. My great grandmother had to be a strong woman, raising an illegitimate child in that period. She
was a good subject. I couldn’t get a handle on that one either.
Then I retired, more time to write, I told myself. Back to short stories, mysteries this time. I always loved mysteries. But editors didn’t love mine. An idea for a fantasy/s-f story wouldn’t let go, so I wrote it and sent it out. Rejections. A chance for a trip abroad came. On my return home, my husband told me I had to call this editor, she wanted to publish my sf story. I didn’t really believe it until several months later when I
held the magazine in my hands, a stone wall turned into paper and ink.
©Sylvia Nickels>
