#catch me writing research papers on the Iroquois for no reason

[brian-wellson]

What got you into writing? What's your story?

It would be cliché for me to say that I have been writing all my life… cliché, but also true. In order to understand that statement, you have to understand who I am as a person.

I come from a broken home. An actual broken home — my biological parents divorced when I was two or so; I lived with (and was physically and emotionally abused by) my biodad while my mom was in a psychiatric hospital; my biodad told me I was a mistake; and my mom lived with a prostitute because she needed someone to help her make rent. All of this by age five! Books were, by all rights, my only friends. Books were a marker of stability — they were pretty much all I had.

When I had entered kindergarten, I was already reading at the fifth grade level. By the end of that school year, the seventh grade level. Even as a kindergartener, I think I recognized that literacy was imperative, for it was through reading that I could give myself something I was not getting elsewhere. I could play in a peaceful, sun drenched  meadow, I could meet dignitaries and nobles and queens and kings, I could be a biological researcher … If I could imagine it, then it would happen. (Reader’s Digest had some amazing coffee table books back then filled with detailed pictures and graphics and flow charts … but, most of all, clear and concise text.)

Anyhow. Around second grade or so, I immersed myself in the Choose Your Own Adventure series (and its compatriot, the Time Machine series). I thought they were amazing. It was then I realized that there were so many different ways to end a story, so many different ways to your demise. I think I liked them so much because the crux of their concept and execution hinges on personal choice; the books were comprised of short vignettes, and every short vignette was accompanied by a choice at the vignette’s end. That choice would send you to a different part of the book, down a new line of inquiry. Retrospectively, I see my child’s reasoning — if I could not control things at home, then I would seek it out elsewhere. Lo and behold, I was given control in the form of books! The choices I made actually mattered! I was hooked, and read every book many times over. I found myself wanting more of them, but none in that series were to be had; I was reading them too quickly, and my pace overtook new book drops.

Concomitant with reading the aforementioned series, I began to staple little books together. They were made of college-ruled notebook paper. As you can no doubt guess, I modelled my own writing off that in which I had immersed myself. I think the first ‘book’ I ever wrote was entitled “The Lost Gold of the Seneca”. I’m originally from upstate New York, and we are pretty steeped in Iroquois culture; as a child, the Seneca tribe fascinated me. Well, I had my culture… what about the plot? The plot was based off a myth my grandfather had told me about an old, abandoned lead mine in the southwestern Catskills. So I merged the lead mine myth with Seneca culture, and made my own story. Of course there was no gold to be had in real life… but I was only eight. A writer typically writes about the things with which they have familiarity. And, like I said, I was eight. (I wonder if that little book, written on scraps of stapled notebook paper, is laying around anywhere?)

When I was 12 (1991), my mom had several psychotic breaks. She became violent and delusional. My reading habits had, of course, grown along with me over time. I had just finished Tom Clancy’s Hunt for Red October and Patriot Games. (I was also an avid reader of comic books, though they did not figure into anything. I just liked Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, and Infinity Gauntlet. They were so fun to read!)

As my mom battled her mental health issues, my stepfather searched frantically for job following his layoff from a defence contractor… all while I had to contend with being — well, bad things would happen to me when I would visit my biodad.

High school was a  difficult transition for me. My mom, stepfather, and I moved from our creepy ass apartment in the bad part of town to a complex close to the high school on the hill; our complex was in the nicest part of town. Somehow the rent was cheaper… well, not somehow, it was about two-thirds the size of what we’d had before. I was small and awkward. I read books. I was a musician. Accusations of homo- and bisexuality were levelled at me, and I was bullied relentlessly as a result (high school was much different in the 1990s… ‘boys will be boys’ was still the norm, and bullying was not that big of a deal). You can imagine how that went — a poor, artistic kid who kept to himself, and was socially awkward, and slapped with the label of – as they would say – “being a queer”? During my walks home from school, rocks and bottles would be hurled at me from passing cars along with  derogatory taunts about my mom, my stepfather, and me. What friends I had were people of convenience, people in my orbit. One of them even shot me with a BB gun once just because he thought it would be fun. (Hint: it wasn’t.)

So I took control.

The resultant novella I wrote was sprawling, a true epic of ambition. 150 pages. Gunfights, a conflicted sniper, the mafia, international jewel thieves, a corrupt cop, the mass media, a jet ski pursuit down raging rapids, Army Rangers, and international, multicultural government agents. Oh — and a town levelled in the third act by gunfire and bombs and grenades and an exploding helicopter shot down with a Stinger missile. All of the novella’s characters were metonymic for people I knew in real life. This was my attempt to put them into the slots as I saw them: hero, villain, bystander, enabler, or something in between. This was my attempt at control. I left it open for a sequel, but it never materialized. The novella itself took about 1.5 years to crank out (on a word processor; we did not have a  computer in our house until I was a senior). Not bad for a 12-year-old. I was proud of that manuscript. I am still proud of it… in fact, it’s one of the few artifacts I have kept from those horrible adolescent years; the sole copy sits with my other archival materials from later in life (like my ballets and my flute concerto/dissertation). Who knows. If I ever write a novel, perhaps I will use that plot.

With college came baggage, and with baggage came a downward spiral of my own mental health. I ended up functionally homeless for a couple of months… I was not allowed to be around the house when my parents were home, but I could clean myself up and catch some sleep during the day. That summer (1999), I started an Angelfire online journal, one that was modelled after my best friend’s. She and I were in a very similar space, and it seemed to help her out, so I decided to try it; to tell you our state of mind, my favourite line I had written from that time: ‘I wish I was a river rat’. My best friend had been thrown out by her dad, so, that summer, we had each other’s backs: sleeping under bridges, dumpster diving for cans and bottles and trinkets, selling trash at yard sales, eating from abandoned room service trays. Things were bad, but we still had our words – I still had my words.

Every day for a year (1999-2000), I updated that online journal. Over that span, I welcomed more and more followers — so many followers that had I to buy my own domain and server space (2000-2004). The domain hosted not only my own online journal, but those of others, as well. That core of people, we became our own community, and exchanged stories with each another across the continent. We organized an epic meet up, and people from up and down the Eastern Seaboard showed up. In fact, I am still in contact with several of the other online journalers. My site won a “Best of the Web” award, an award I had not sought, nor did I necessarily think I deserved, but one which made me happy. The site was a true labour of love: all of the HTML & CSS coding was written by me (in Notepad), all of the photos were digitally rendered by me, and all of the written (and musical) content was written by me. I even had a live streaming cam for the semester when I reënrolled. (And yes, there were watchers.)

I kept that online journal for years; eventually the constant maintenance became too much for me to handle. I needed to bang out my Masters (including thesis!) in a year, and went straight on to my doctoral program (2004). Writing fell by the wayside for many years…

…and then I had an accident which rendered me neurologically and physically compromised (2010). I couldn’t work, and I hated doing nothing, so I went back to school (2012-2016), and started down a path of study which has proven to be generous to me.

If you had told that disabled guy of four years ago that he would be offered an MFA slot at many different & prestigious schools to study Creative Nonfiction, he would have laughed at you.

If you had told the little, socio-economically disadvantaged teenager from a broken home that he would be offered a slot at an ivy for graduate school, he probably would have tried to kick your ass … it had been accepted that those things weren’t meant for people like him — for people like me. We don’t get to do that, we don’t belong there. This is a belief that still haunts today for many different reasons. That said:

I believe education is the great equalizer. Knowledge, wisdom, and literacy are the things that grant equity in our culture. Yes, it is used as a weapon by some; yes, it is also used as a form of control.

But that control was mine to take. I had no other option. So, I seized it.

That just about sums it up. These are the stories and reasons why I write, why I read, and why I care so very much about literacy. These are the reasons why I care about all of the writing I read on this site every single day. Each person has it in their power to craft a good story, and each story has the potential to change the way a person sees themselves and the world around them.

These are things I believe to be true.

Thank you for such a lovely ask.

(( @alastar-wyatt ))

#Alastar Wyatt #OoC #Author