Grow Your Garden

Hello and Welcome to Sitting in Silence, the newsletter about joy, writing, craft, and worry.

One thing I love about teaching creative writing is how so many students come to it from a place of love. They grew up reading, which was perhaps unusual in their families. They probably kept a journal. They started writing little stories and someone along the way told them they were really good at it. And they loved it. They loved their children’s books and historical novels. They loved feeling of lying in a hammock or by a pool and entering someone else’s world. They adored being read to by their mother or father. And then they got the bug to make their own stories, their own worlds. But were they ready write?

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Today, let’s talk about: Grow Your Garden.

When I was a child, I often spent weekends and summers with my maternal grandparents, Aaron Hearns and Louise Hearns, in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. This was a beautiful area with black-owned corner markets, record stores, and homes that had been in families for generations. My grandparents had a two-story house on two big plots of land surrounded by a metal hurricane fence, which their (our) beloved mutt, Pepi, ran up to yapping when you arrived. The house was on the left lot and the right lot was a grassy expanse. The Armour family lived on the next housed lot to the right. Someone nearby was a school bus driver because a yellow bus stayed parked across from my grandparents’ place. Toward the back of my grandparent’s empty lot was one of my favorite places on earth: Grandpa’s Garden.

Grandma was an elementary school teacher and church secretary. Giver of lessons. Balancer of ecumenical accounts. On the other hand, Grandpa was an outdoor man who loved to get his hands dirty. He worked for city sanitation driving dump trucks. During Mardi Gras, he drove the street sweepers that cleaned up after parades. And during his downtime he cut grass around town. When he wasn’t cutting grass, he tended his garden.

One day Grandpa called me outside to help. I don’t know how much good I was to him. I was only six or so. But I recall the earthy scent of the dark, freshly tilled soil. Grandpa walked along, sturdy boots falling between rows of cabbage, lettuce, and watermelon.

“See this?” he would have said as he proudly showed off his green-red tomatoes, “it’s good.”

I was struck by the beauty of the ripening tomato against the skin of his strong fingers. The little bit of fuzz along the bright, green stalk. It was almost like I could see the tomato growing before my eyes, see life thriving before me. I asked him if I could eat it. He would have said not yet, but, looking around at the burgeoning goodness, he would say, eventually you can have anything you’re willing to sow and harvest.

Grandpa taught me a life lesson that I’ve carried with me since that day, a lesson that I’ve consistently applied to my writing practice: anything you want to eat can and must be grown in your own garden.

This is a season of harvest for me. I’ll be telling you in the coming weeks about beautiful honors that my work has received. But let’s flip the pages of my story backward for a moment.

In middle school, one of my teachers instructed the class to write a summer theme. In that classroom, in late August of 1989 or ’90, my classmates groaned. But with sunlight streaming down into the room, I was thrumming with excitement. You mean I get to write about what fun I had over the past few months and get credit for it? Yes, ma’am. Don’t mind if I do.

I don’t actually remember what I wrote then. The physical copy of that paper, written in my large childish penmanship, would have been in the New England Patriots toy chest (this is back when the Pats were losers; way before Tom Brady; probably given to my dad by a friend when I was born or even by my parrain). It was light blue with a cushioned white vinyl top you could sit on. The floodwaters of Katrina got that chest and virtually everything else in that house. But that’s a story for the inevitable memoir I’ll one day subject you to.

Still, I recall the teacher saying I’d done a good job and asking me to read my theme (all 500 words or so of it) to my classmates. I was a good kid. And that kind of validation meant something to me. A chance to say my piece and be respected for it. Nice.

The point of today’s post is that success in writing is always a little closer than you might think. Your writing garden is fertile. If you’re willing to plant a few things, you might be surprised at what thrives in that soil.