I was going to be a poet when I grew up. I didn’t have a coherent plan for this–what I had was a bunch of sharp, motivating images, like a PowerPoint substitute for an actual plan:
- I would have my own garret, with long streaks of butterscotch light from the skylight.
- My garret would be in Paris, because Paris is where artists go to starve.
- I would live on French bread and black coffee, because I was poor. I didn’t like black coffee much in those days–and my idea of coffee back then was instant coffee–but I liked it better than red wine, which was the other drink option I knew for Parisian poets.
 |
My childhood image of poverty and city life was based on the pictures by Ethel Franklin Betts in my copy of A Little Princess:
Beautiful, misunderstood Sara Crewe leans out the skylight of her lonely garret,* feeding birds, with a backdrop of picturesque London rooftops. * What is a garret? A romantic, fictional attic. |
Not until college did I figure out that starving in garrets has big drawbacks as a lifetime career.
Amazing how “bullet points” can bully you into enormous leaps of happy illogic.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Yvonne Adams // May 3, 2004 at 7:40 am
I never did the Parisian garret thing either, but I know several people who did.
The eldest an artist, the middle one as a student, the youngest as a sous chef.
I suspect all three had the wine with their baguettes.
2 Betsy Devine // May 3, 2004 at 10:28 am
Hey, Yvonne, aren’t you in Santa Fe? I’m going to be there in late July, let’s do baguettes or at least sopapaillas (sp?)
3 Yvonne Adams // May 4, 2004 at 7:33 am
Sounds great!
4 fp // May 4, 2004 at 11:26 am
Lacking the cosmopolitan perspective that might have pushed me toward Paris, and carrying the burden of beat influence in my very soul, I ended up doing my starving artist moments in San Francisco in 1964 – Chianti and sourdough bread and not enough fruits and vegetables. I laid up in my garret with thick novels and slim books of verse and created nothing. You shoulda been there…
5 Dean Landsman // May 5, 2004 at 1:11 pm
Back in the halcyon days of my idealistic youth, and youthful dreams, there was this vague plan. I would go into the radio business, enjoy a career there, grow up, and manage to retire young enough to have the time to write a series of novels.
No garret was necessarily a part of the dream, although the concept of writing was so romantic and intriguing, it might as well have been in one.
Life, of course, gets in the way of the plans we make (how fitting, eh? A Double Fantasy reference!) and although I did enjoy 25 or so years in Radio . . . I did not manage to retire early with the luxury of being able to devote the requisite amount of time it takes to compose a novel (or two or three or more).
That said, for the past few months I have disciplined myself to spend a certain amount of time actually paying attention to –and working on!– some writings that have been jangling about in my cranium for quite some time.
Hopefully this will be unlike the ones I’ve started and abandoned, or the ones I’ve outlined or sketched out in something that resembles treatment style.
Despite not having realized my deam of becoming a published author of fictional works . . . that people might even enjoy reading . . . there is definitely some solace in having a blog. That’s a place to write, to communicate, and to be read and get comments from others.
Just like right here!