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Print Dreams
By DSBriggs
Back in the day when I was a teen, I wanted to be a writer. I picked out my pen name, Kelly Brione.
I began to dress as a writer. My image, based on a Stanford University guide, was to dress in black tights, a gray skirt, and a pink fluffy sweater over a black leotard.
I had plans to write the Great American Novel, even though I did not have a clue how to do that.
I talked enough about being a writer that my Dad purchased a Smith-Corona portable typewriter for me. It had Elite type rather than the larger Pica type. Elite was the size of type that newspapers used for writing news stories in columns.
I dreamed about being a columnist like Herb Caen or Erma Bombeck.
One thing about writing is that I have always loved libraries.
Back in the day when libraries were stocked with books and magazines, tables and chairs for studying space and enforced quiet. So different today, with cases of CDs, DVDs, media, and computers in place of drawers filled with index cards that let you finger thru author, title or subject cards.
There are, of course, still books, but stacked in tall narrow aisles. So narrow in fact that a person with a backpack cannot turn around. If two people are in the aisle, one has to back up so the other may squeeze by.
Back in the day when aisles were wider, a girl could sit on the floor and read a chapter or two before deciding whether to check the book out. The library limit was two books and two weeks before it was overdue.
Back in the days of my late teens I had a summer internship at the local paper that published only on Wednesdays. I got to write features. That was really fun and some were even published.
However, when the Sports Reporter was sent to Alaska to cover our hometown’s quest for the Little League World Championship, I was assigned to cover the local sports desk. I never had to go to a game but would wait for the scores to be phoned in to write up before midnight deadline.
What I remember most was struggling to come up with forty different ways to say beaten or defeated. That was probably the most colorful coverage of weekly scores the readers ever had. Despite having been published, I was not offered a job at the end of my internship.
So in the fall I went onto college to start my major in Journalism. The required English classes killed my interest in writing. I was not interested in why a comma was placed where it was. Line by line analysis of Cotton Mathers’ 17th century sermons extinguished my dream of becoming a writer.
So I switched to Social Science, a major for people who didn’t know what they wanted when their dream became a nightmare.
I stopped writing.
As a side note, I recovered my love of writing.
DSBriggs began writing again by journaling. It was, however, Marlene Cullen’s introduction to prompt writing thru Jumpstart that reignited DSBriggs love of writing just for the sake of writing.
Dreams of being published were realized when her work was included in The Write Spot Anthologies: Discoveries, Possibilities and Path To Healing.
DSBriggs still lives near a library in Northern California.
