My Very Second Best
It’s been a while, my precious substack readers. And I’ve missed being in communication with you. My life has been swallowed up in a new job: teaching 6th grade ELA. I personally loved the 6th grade as a child. Perhaps that nostalgia led me to believe I was up for the task. But it has been, in a word, hard. And yet, sometimes there are bright moments. For instance, I require all the kids to lug around classroom library books and sometimes they even read them.
Before fall hit and my life as I knew it went deep underground, I listened to Krista Tippett’s On Being interview with Mary Oliver. I had listened to it years before but as with so many revisitings, it held something new. She said that whenever she had a job, which wasn’t that often, she’d tell them that she could give it her “very second best”. Because she always got up at five “and by nine I’d already had my say.”
This struck me profoundly and I decided to take her view—to offer the teaching my very second best. And so I’ve been getting up at 5 am to write for an hour, a practice that sounds more impressive than it is, but has become necessary to my sanity. If I hadn’t heard Mary Oliver on my morning walk along the cotton fields shortly before we moved last summer, I would quite possibly be in the throes of a breakdown. But showing up for the page before the day has beaten me down keeps me grounded in that alternate reality: that I am a writer. That I write.
The day before school started, I got an email from an editor at Boulevard Magazine, telling me I had won the Short Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers. I don’t mind admitting that I cried where I sat on the outside couch that morning, reading that email and feeling that it was a very solid communiqué from the Universe, reminding me as I took a final breath before the plunge into public school life: YOU ARE A WRITER. KEEP WRITING.
In case you are looking wildly for such a signpost yourself, consider this rare post as that sign. You are a writer. Keep writing.
Cheers,
Lacy
P.S. The story hasn’t yet been published. But when it is, I’ll blast you all with the link ;-)