Be Careful With Your Dreams – On Mentors, Faith, and Taking Wing by Robin Clifford Wood
When I was a young woman, I still harbored a childhood fantasy: When I grow up, I want to be an author! At age thirty, I had published a grand total of two articles, eight years apart. I was a full-time mom of three young children. My imminent prospects involved broken sleep, not breaking into literary fame. Still, one can dream. While attending a meeting of local volunteers around that time, we were asked to take part in an icebreaker activity. Each of us had to share a life dream. We were to begin our sentence, “I’ve always wanted to…” then fill in the blank. For me it was easy. “I’ve always wanted to publish a book…” I said, then added the fateful phrase, “…but it probably won’t happen until I’m like, sixty.”
Decades passed. At last, the exhilarating fruition of a dream came to pass! This year, 2021, my first book was published. I am sixty years old.
Damn. Why didn’t I say forty? Even fifty? Dreams can be slippery. I imagine my dream, hurt by the vote of no-confidence, saying, Fine. I won’t make a liar out of you. Sixty it is. Half a year past my sixtieth birthday, I celebrated the release of my biography-memoir hybrid, The Field House: A Writer’s Life Lost and Found on an Island in Maine, the story of once-renowned writer Rachel Field. Why did it take me so long? Did I doom myself to the delay?
“Writing is hard work. It takes a lot of time.” One of my faculty mentors in the Stonecoast MFA program spoke these simple words often, as a reminder. She’s right – time and effort are critical ingredients to writing success, but a useful additive is a bit of faith in ourselves, which can be tough to come by. So many of us have a voice inside us that says – Why bother? I’m not a real writer. My writing sucks. I’ll never get anywhere – choose your undermining jab. In his wonderful book, The War of Art, Steven Pressfield calls those negative voices resistance. Resistance gets in everyone’s way.
I consider myself lazy and unproductive. Sound familiar? When I was in the earliest stages of working on the biographical research about Rachel Field that eventually became The Field House, I remember giving a talk about my stuttering writing life. I was in my late 40s at the time, and I self-deprecatingly pronounced myself “just” a full-time mom who had no place calling herself a writer.
A woman in the audience challenged me. “Your bio sure doesn’t look like that to me,” she said. I was taken aback. Then I saw it through her eyes and realized she was right. By 48, I had accumulated a not-insignificant list of work, not all published, but enough to mention. Somehow it took an outsider to point out to me that I’d cultivated a respectable writing life; it just wasn’t the elusive “writing career” in my fantasy vision. My portfolio didn’t match my standards of success. It didn’t look the way I imagined it should, and it had taken so long to accumulate, so I discounted and disparaged what I had done.
Isn’t it funny how attaining an accomplishment diminishes it? You’ve always wanted to be published, and your local newspaper publishes your essay. Hooray! Yeah, but it’s not a big newspaper, you say. I barely got paid anything, you say. It was only one, you say. You publish another one eight years later. They pay you more, and they include a little illustration to go with it. Cool! Look at me! But soon your inner critic kicks in. Yeah, but it’s a tiny little newsmagazine. Who even reads it? You publish fifty short pieces for an online news source. You are writing every day! Good for you! Yeah, but it pays pennies. It’s just a rinky-dink site.
I wonder if Nicholas Sparks, who’s had 11 of his books adapted for film, says to himself, “yeah, but Steven King’s had 34.” Why do we downgrade ourselves so pathologically? We dream balloons, then fill our backpacks with rocks.
One solution to our obstructive attitude is to look outside of ourselves for allies. Lucky for me, I have a life partner who doggedly pushes me out of the doldrums of doubt. Jonathan told me he’d stay home with our kids for a year so I could complete the Master’s Degree in English I kept talking about. He slipped an advertisement for a local columnist in front of me and encouraged me to apply. My second columnist job came as a result of him singing my praises to a Bangor Daily News editor he met at a fundraiser. He urged and praised and supported me through every step and misstep along the way, including the thirteen-year journey to publishing my first book. He had more confidence in me than I did, and it helped, a lot.
Then there’s the fabulous parade of mentors and writing colleagues I have gathered along the way through one-day workshops, weekend seminars, writer retreats, and a two-year MFA program. Never underestimate the importance of people who believe in you, because they see what you do not. Believe them!
You can find mentors anywhere. One of my greatest inspirations has been Rachel Field, who died almost twenty years before I was born. This woman I never met became intimately entwined with my writing life. Her writing and her archived letters buoyed my flagging spirits as I trod the long road to completing her biography. Her voice accompanied me in archive collections around the country and inside the walls of a beloved summer house on an island in Maine that was once hers, then became mine.
Mentors are life-changing. Still, encouragement from the outside needs a receptive audience on the inside. At some point, we need to recognize our own light. We need to revisit the aspirations of our youth with compassion and belief, and entertain the idea that maybe we had something going on back then that’s worthy of our attention. We need to put more faith in our dreams and give them wings. I wish that back when I was thirty, I had seen my hopeful yearnings as legitimate – not thirty years down the road, but right then. It’s possible that I needed every one of those subsequent years to find my mentors, gather my life’s experiences, and navigate my way here. Then again, if I’d given wings to my dreams right then and there, perhaps I’d be on book four by now. Who can know?
ROBIN CLIFFORD WOOD has a BA from Yale University, an MA in English from the University of Rochester, and an MFA in creative writing from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine. During twenty-five years as a full-time mom, she published local human-interest features in New Hampshire, New York, and Massachusetts and spent seven years as a regular columnist, first in Massachusetts, then for Maine’s Bangor Daily News. She began teaching college writing in 2015. Her articles have appeared in Port City Life magazine, Bangor Metro, and Solstice literary magazine, which published her powerful essay “How Do You Help Your Parents Die?” in its spring 2019 issue. Her award-winning poetry received national recognition from the 2020 Writer's Digest Competition. Wood lives in central Maine with her husband and dogs. The Field House is her first book.
For more information, visit www.robincliffordwood.com.
Buy links for The Field House links:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Field-House-Writers-Found-Island/dp/1647420458