Relationships with Writing

This--Anne Bradstreet's "The Author to Her Book"--is one of the first poems I was ever required to analyze in detail. (I'm telling you what "this" refers to, because if any of you are like me, you will think more than twice about following that link . . .) I'm sure I kept a copy of my analysis, but I'm not going to hunt it down just now.

But I do remember this: the writer who is narrator in the poem obviously has motherly inclinations toward her work. And I do remember this: I was perceptive enough back then to realize that motherly inclinations did not mean that she desperately loved everything about what she had written. In fact, it made her want to correct the faults.

And most of all, I remember the third line, about friends snatching away the work before she felt ready to show it to the world at large.

I remember this, because I have been writing a number of things lately. (English grad student writing a lot . . . go figure!) And my sentiments do not, in the slightest, echo Bradstreet at all. After a certain germination period, I grow anxious about kicking my work out the door and into someone else's realm.

At first, I thought my desire to get my writing out of my sight had some direct affiliations with how much I liked the content. But I have discovered such is simply not the case: I disliked the intermittent papers I wrote for my critical theory class throughout the course of the semester--the topics were, more or less, assigned--but the non-assigned final paper I fell deeply in love with? I wanted to drop that in my professor's mailbox just as quickly as I had rid myself of the other papers I had written.

If I am to adopt Anne Bradstreet's mother-metaphor, I suppose this means that I am the sort of writer-mother who likes to boot her child out of the house as soon as it has turned eighteen. I try to nurture it as much as I can, but there inevitably comes a point when it should strike out on its own. I figure that if I ever write and publish anything that receives the whole spectrum of reactions, then a) I have succeeded, and b) I can create and send a sibling of that paper out into the world to help keep that "child" company.

And who knows? If I have learned anything from re-reading things I wrote during my undergraduate career, I might even occasionally invite them home for dinner.