I would never presume to second-guess why and when other writers decide to put pen to paper and submit their private thoughts to scrutiny. In my case, the timing and motivation were both clear. I delayed writing for publication until I closed in on 50. Until then, I had no voice.
Scott Momaday, fresh from winning the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, offered a small seminar in my final semester at UC Berkeley. I had just walked out of a large, undergraduate creative writing class where a consensus emerged from the first session: art for art’s sake was trivial. The class voted collectively to gather our works together into a volume, the purpose of which was to serve the revolution. Anything less was discarded as trash.
I transferred into Momaday’s seminar and found myself in the company of four graduate-level English majors where we worked without the pressure to conform. After the final session, Scott informed me that, if I had any completed work, I could probably begin publishing right away.
I thanked him for his kind words but shook my head.
“I have nothing of importance to say. Also, I don’t care to make money with what I write. Until I accept and understand what life teaches of what true value consists, I will have nothing to contribute … nothing that will reach out to my parents’ or grandparents’ generations.”
And so I immersed myself in life and threw open my heart and mind, trusting that the right sorts of lessons would follow. Some would be easy, some hard, but all good.
By 30, I convinced myself that I had it pretty well figured out. The theme of my doctoral dissertation was a transvaluation of all hitherto existing values in Western civilization. Heavy stuff. Hell. Far too heavy for a callow youth with so many mistakes yet to make.
At 47, a dear old friend who owned two local newspapers gave me my first weekly byline. Those were my “liberal” days and what I wrote for print, I suppose, passed muster. Looking back now, the words were tight and controlled and revealed too many years writing as an academic. And I still lacked real depth of understanding.
After two years, I said most of what I wanted to say and took a long break. Until 9/11, the Patriot Act, Homeland Security and the buildup for the Iraq War.
In the wee hours of a spring morning, after the nickels, dimes and quarters were all swept off our felt poker table and when only three players remained I shared with Gill and Chidester a 3 o-clock epiphany.
“Things are getting so bad, I want to start publishing columns again, but I’m afraid, with what I have to say now, I could end up in a file somewhere in Washington D.C.”
In response, Fiddlin’ Big Al fixed me with a half-drunk gaze.
“But if you don’t write because you’re afraid of what they’ll do to you they’ve already won.”
Ratty junkyard club house gut check time.
The next morning I called Lu Jane and, just like that, I was writing for two papers.
Months passed but, inevitably, pressure was put on my publisher friend by right-wing advertisers to pull my columns. The timing was good and I left the print media to host a weekly political talk show broadcast on KRFP’s first season: “The Barefoot Elitist”
And then came the Donald and the gloves came off … this time courtesy of the Daily News.
Over the span of years, life has taught me much about love, honesty, virtue and how, finally, I might ask readers, if they haven’t done so already, to open their minds and think a little outside the box.
To live life fully is to embrace its essential ambiguities and, without a guru, a priest or a holy text, negotiate its treacherous missteps … seldom an easy thing to do.
I once had simple answers to everything. But, as we read in Corinthians, “when I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child but when I became a man I put away childish things.”
On Saturday at Bruised Books in Pullman, I will for the first time offer a book signing. Eleven are sold on Amazon; many will be available at the event. There will be fiction, philosophy, politics and memoirs.
McGehee, a lifelong activist, settled here in 1973 and lives in Palouse with his wife, Katherine. His work life has varied from bartender to university instructor to wrecking yard owner.
