Violation: Collected Essays. Sallie Tisdale

       Introduction

      WHEN I WAS SEVENTEEN AND A SOPHOMORE IN COLLEGE, I took any course that interested me. One semester, I signed up for Advanced Writing. (I had never taken a writing class, but I was a bit of a snob.) I bugged Dr. Ryberg constantly, haunting his office hours until he took pity, declared me his assistant, and set me to the filing. I gave him a lot of junk to read. Toward the end of the semester, I gave him a story with trembling hands. I was so proud of it; I thought it might win a few awards. He handed it back to me a few days later with entire pages crossed off in red ink. He had circled the last paragraph and written, “Start here.”

      The following spring, I ran into him in the college bookstore. I was dropping out, I told him. Going north to test my theories of love and goodness.

      “You’re a writer,” he said. “You’re already a better writer than me. What are you waiting for?”

      I think I laughed. What an idea—that you could be a writer. But I wasn’t ready; I was consuming life like a gourmand just let out of jail. I went north and joined a communal household and a co-op and tested, with some success, several theories of love and goodness. I was still signing up for every subject that looked promising. But after a few years, when I had a new baby and hardly any money and decided at the last moment not to move into another commune in the mountains, I thought that instead I could be a writer. I hocked my piano and bought a typewriter and joined a writing support group. The leader told us to study Writer’s Market, so I sat in the reference room of the library and read about query letters and submission guidelines. I started writing essays about all kinds of things and sent them out more or less at random, with polite cover letters and self-addressed stamped envelopes.

      Out they went and back they came. Sometimes there was a little note thanking me for my submission, but often not. I would type a fresh copy and send the story out again. The support group dissolved after a few months when the leader committed suicide. Others might have taken that as a sign, but I was young and ignorant and somehow immune to despair. I had decided to be a writer and so I wrote. I sent stories out, again and again. And then one didn’t come back.

      The essays in this book are a selection of work spanning almost thirty years. I have never lost my fascination with the essay, and the stories here range across the continuum of the form. You don’t know what your voice sounds like until you speak. My writer’s voice chose itself. I recognize it here, but I’m not in charge. I used to wish I was a comic writer or a novelist or an investigative reporter. I tried to be a poet for a while. What I am is an essayist.

      Certain themes recur as well; why should this ever surprise us? Life is just following a trail around a mountain. The path loops back to the same view time and again. Sometimes we see all the