this hawks nest: etsy friday : to write

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a writer. Then in sixth grade, I wrote a story about a squirrel enduring a storm and running to a trusty old tree for safety, only to have it struck down by lightning. The idea was my mother's, but I ran with it. I spent hours going through my thesaurus in search of new ways to express my "old" ideas.

It was in this exercise that I discovered one of my favorite words: incandescent.

Unfortunately, my teachers did not believe I wrote it. They accused me of plegarism, and I was so humiliated, I didn't stick up for myself. I never wrote a story for my own satisfaction again. In graduate school, I learned that I'm really not the best writer anyway, so no harm done in the long run. But it is the event that I think back to most, and most randomly, wishing I could just go back and fight for my work.

So today's etsy friday is a glass raised for all those who love to write, and still do so.