Michele Fogal, author of the Wildseed Series, speaks on her Passion as part of the February Guest Post Series. She believes, as I do, that OUR PASSIONS CHOOSE US.
Thanks Wren for the invite to share my thoughts on this awesome topic! It’s an idea that is very close to my heart these days.
I started writing seriously in high school. There was an outreach program called New Shoots from a local university (University of British Columbia) where their grad students were sent out to high schools to facilitate extra-curricular Writing Groups for the high school students. I loved it and it resulted in me getting a poem published and getting my work into the year book which were thrilling events for me, as well as overwhelming to the point of nausea.
I knew I wanted to go into Creative Writing and so ended up quite naturally in UBC’s Creative Writing Dept. But then something happened. As my degree in Creative Writing unfolded, I started asking questions about job prospects and journalism and writing for magazines, and publicity and all the real world concerns almost sunk me. I finished my degree mostly because my grandmother told me to (thanks Granny) and came out of it determined to get a “real job” and be a strong independent woman and not a starving artist.
Several jobs and incarnations of myself later, I woke up and realized that I had barely written in a decade. It pulled at me and weighted me down. It was like a tender aching wound in my heart, knowing that I needed to write, that I SHOULD be writing and I wasn’t. Just the thought of all the writing I hadn’t done drained a little more blood out of me. Oh I’d tried to sit down and do my “hobby,” but even those moments that I’d carved out of my life (to pour into this thing that was supposed to make me happy) were fraught with unhappiness.
As I now say to my creative writing students, imagine JK Rowling back before her publishing deal, back before she even started writing stories down. She had Harry Potter and giant spiders and flying cars crawling and whizzing through her mind long before anyone called her a writer. In fact, she was a single mom on welfare, feeling like a failure in all respects, and yet truly, even then, she was a writer.
