by Jessie Seigel, AIW Board Member

Photo Credit: Julia Freeman-Woolpert @ SXC.hu

Why do I write?  Today, I write because characters keep roaming through my head—characters with pasts and futures that I must put down on paper or no one but me will know they exist, and they’ll fade away.  Last year, or the year before, the driving motivation was often a Swiftian anger at the world’s ills and hypocrisies, which expressing to a public relieves.  But, when I began, in my teens, I just wanted to have fun.  To play.

There was nothing dramatic in the decision.  Reading, discussing literature, and writing were in the air all around me while I was growing up.  My father, my mother, and my brother (who is nine years older than myself) all read to me.  The three of them talked about literature around the kitchen table.  There were always books—history, philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, art, dance, mythology, poetry and fiction, above all, fiction—read to me, handed to me, suggested to me.  Also, although neither of my parents published, my father wrote stories and poems.  My mother wrote witty, artistic letters that could have been short stories or the basis for them.  And she came to my father as one comes to an editor:  to suggest a small revision or flourish.  My brother also wrote creative fiction, pieces like his own version of The Odyssey, or a satire in which a poor country’s ambassador to the UN writes home to his president.

The attitude toward writing was that one should have a sense of play.  Not take it too seriously.  Just take in the technique of this or that writer, and feel free to try it out for oneself.  And that’s how I began.  Playing with styles, with words, with ideas.  I wrote a story in the style of Louis Carroll; a dialogue in the style of Tom Stoppard in which two actors argue about whether they should take bows for acting in his play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; a story in which Oscar Wilde’s entrance into heaven depends upon the literary assessment of his works by a jury of fellow writers.

Then two things happened.  I taught myself to draw.  And I became a lawyer.  (I blame the latter on my father, who handed me Irving Stone’s Clarence Darrow for the Defense when I was twelve.)  After writing legal decisions all day, it was easier to draw or paint than to sit again and try to write.  So, for many years I thought about writing but did little more than make scattered notes.

What got me back to writing?  There’s nothing like a few deaths to make you realize you can’t put things off forever.  My mother had said of my art, “that’s nice, Jess, but you should be writing.”  When she died, I thought, if not now, when?  I began again.  I had a world view and I used poetry to express it.

At the same time, I kept telling my father about an idea I had for a novel, and he kept telling me, “don’t tell me the story.  Write it down.”  Then he died.  And that was the kick to the backside that got me to sit down and write the novel.  That novel has now been completed, but the characters, and different, newer ones, still wander through my head, expanding their histories and adventures.  Somehow I’ve moved from playing with ideas to creating universes and, in some odd sense, living in all of them as well as the real one, simultaneously.  I suspect what keeps me writing is creating those worlds.  That’s why I write.  This year, anyhow.

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Jessie Seigel is an AIW board member.  Her fiction has appeared in such publications as Ontario Review, Gargoyle, Elan, and the anthology Electric Grace.  Her poetry has been featured bi-weekly in the Boston Jewish Times. She is an associate editor at The Potomac Review.