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Published on 05/19/1999 All articles from this issue

The genesis of a writer

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By Charlotte Krepismann Jarmy

Reflections

Somewhere in the distant past, a voice whispered to me, "WE ARE PEOPLE OF THE BOOK." I took this message very seriously and never went far from the books I absorbed at the kitchen table, or in my favorite chair in front of a window on hot muggy nights in the Bronx, or under my blankets with the lights out. The voice I heard in my ear in those days was my mother's: "Enough already. You're hurting your eyes."

I dreamed the dreams most girls dreamed, of tall, darkly handsome men making me swoon with their protestations of love, and my reading followed along the same lines.

Writing grew out of my passion for the printed word. No journalism class for this young writer. I needed to tell stories. My dour English teacher glanced up at me over the round metal glasses perched on her nose and spoke, "You read such a mishmash of trashy books and solid classics, no wonder you write maudlin tales of desperate damsels or weepy stories of dying children. Develop some taste."

It took me years before I learned to give my heroines spunk and independence. Eventually I patterned them after my own experiences: strong women, working out of their homes, but still finding time to cook, clean and mother the children. We women of the '50s stayed home with our children, but those of us who dreamed of writing, wrote.

There was one more step on the road to spinning words. Teaching. As a child, I adored the tantalizing boxes of yellow pencils that teachers ruled over. It was at that time, at the tender age of 6, that I knew that someday I would be the one who held the key to the supplies cupboard. I was a good teacher, mainly because I adored little kids, appealed to their endearing funny selves and created ways for then to unlock the torrents of words that poured from their mouths and then sat rather primly on the long sheet of mostly unused paper.

It was when I shifted to high schoolers, however, that I came into my own, entering a league where the young players learned to use metaphors and imagery. "Life is a spin of the roulette wheel" wrote one teen-age cynic. As a novice English teacher, I showed my students how to structure their literary essays by doing it for them, quite proud of my innate ability to communicate ideas. It was only when I heard one student tell another, "Take your paper up to her. She'll write it for you," that I learned that bad writing comes from tapping into someone else's brain. After that, my credo became "BE YOURSELF." It worked for my students and it worked for me.

I left teaching and moved closer to my underlying love affair with the written word. I took with me a focus on sharing emotions and ideas with a larger audience.

Yes, I sold my writing, mostly to magazines that looked for advice on parenting, on using the inner spirit to find peace, on love gone right and love gone wrong. One of my books, called INHERITANCE, will see its way into print. I will write about this major event as we go. Right now, the publisher is talking about September. I have to pinch myself to face this new reality.

Charlotte K. Jarmy , a Los Altos resident, supervises teachers at Stanford University and is a free-lance writer.