Why?

I’ve been ruminating on why I write.

I’ve written on this issue before (see https://iwritebecause.com/2012/10/02/juanita-mantz-writes-because/).

But now, in my mid forties, I think I write because I must. When I write, at least sometimes, I lose myself in it. It’s as if I am transported back to my childhood and I hear my dad’s voice.

They don’t tell you as a child how hard life is. Maybe we wouldn’t want to grow up. Everyone would be Peter Pan. But, as an adult, I think back and understand it a bit more. That is why memoir works. Looking back retrospectively, the connections are clearer. The intersections make sense. I write to understand and discover myself. And that’s what and why I write.

Everything seemed so less complicated back then in the 1970s and 1980s. There were 5 or 6 channels on the television. No cell phones or Internet. I remember when we got a phone with call waiting. It was a big deal. Before that, you would have to call and call and get a busy signal.

My childhood and teenage years were spent outdoors in Ontario, California. Riding bikes, walking to my best friends’ houses or to the ballgame. We drank and smoked, but drugs were less common. There was a Pizza Hut that was a real restaurant with red checkered tablecloths and tiny televisions you could watch for a quarter. Drive In theaters were the Saturday night staple with my dad or a game of Rummy.

It was hard to make it as a blue collar family, but my parents made it fine for many years until they didn’t. And that’s where the story is. In how my family broke apart and came back together. How I broke down my senior year of high school and put myself back together again.

I guess I write because I’m nostalgic. I try not to be too sentimental. I’m obsessed with character. Less with plot. I think there is beauty in capturing the ordinary.

I have a line in a poem: “What some call humdrum I name bliss”.

So that’s why I write. That’s why.