Life Risks

by Jonterri Gadson

In one of my meetings with Greg Orr (both names for Marita's sake lol) he made the comment that poetry must really mean something if I'm willing to take such life risks in the name of it. He's right; I have it bad for poetry, I do. I already know I won't be happy doing anything else, so it's less about poetry being some sort of talent, and more that poetry is an affliction.

I can't get the idea of taking life risks out of my head. We're all taking life risks for the sake of our art. But why? How did you come to the point where you were willing to make sacrifices to be a poet/fiction writer?

I'll start and I'm going waaay back to third grade lol.

In 3rd grade, I was taken out of the regular English lessons to go with a special tutor and write short stories for an hour every day. This was because I scored well above my grade level on the English section of the achievement tests. This was the first time I received positive recognition for writing/English.

In 7th grade, I heard about a poetry contest. I wrote down this poem and handed it in to my Language Arts teacher:

Shattered dreams of mine, created over time
By a little girl, in her own small world
with a wide expanding mind

Shattered dreams like glass
in my mind they last.
What about her future
and the time she spent preparing
for the shattered dreams to pass?

That's a pre-teen JT original, folks lol. I agonized over that last line. It's still not right, well, the whole thing is just wrong lol. I read it so much before I handed it in that I still have it memorized today. She didn't comment on it, just told me to type it up and mail it in if I wanted to. I never mailed it in.

In 8th grade, I stole my mother's poetry from a box in the garage and brought it to school. My mother wrote this poetry in the 60's...as a black woman in the 60's...as a black woman in the 60's in America. Well, anyway, the poem I turned into my 8th grade English class as my own was "Black Man Let Go of That Dirty White Hand." OMG! Oh, did I mention I was in Idaho in 8th grade. Yeah, that went over well. "It's a little militant, don't you think?" LOL I remember the beginning of this poem:

We've been in the white man's hand a little too long
Now it's time we let him know that we too are strong,
but to do this we must have black unity
but black people are not united as our people should be.

So yeah...

In high school, I was asked to read "To--" by John Keats out loud. I started out reading it with a fake English accent and trying to be funny and then I got caught up in the rhythm and the beauty of what I was reading and I actually started saying "oh!" out loud like "oh, how beautiful." It was crazy. That's the first time I remember being affected by a poem. I read that poem now and I don't see what I saw then.

In short: I grew up. I let myself down. Other people let me down. And by people I mean men lol. But family too. Religion no longer made sense to me and I felt very alone just for being alive. The one thing I was certain of was my internal drive to write. So I decided that if I was going to be here on this Earth doing this living thing then I was going to do what I was internally driven to do so I could at least maybe have a shot at happiness while I'm here.

So that's me and why I write. What about you and why you write? Why are you taking life risks (like getting an art degree lol)? I'm interested to see things we might have in common that led us to writing.