A Safe Hatchery

For Mrs. Morris

Photo by Muhammad Syafi Al - adam on Unsplash

I may or may not have shared on here that I’m leading an Artist’s Way study at our little bookshop in Lancaster, PA. If you aren’t familiar with The Artist’s Way, it’s a book on creativity by Julia Cameron, penned in the early nineties, back when I was still teasing my bangs and pegging my jeans and had already begun losing touch with my inner “artist child,” a term Cameron lovingly uses throughout the book.

Yes, I, at the ripe age of 14 had succumbed to the belief that the key to the Good Life was “fitting in,” hence all my attention was given to soul-sapping comparisons and Herculean efforts to be “cool” despite the fact that I constantly felt “uncool.”

As I was working through the current chapter I’m reading in The Artist’s Way, Cameron asks us, her readers, to do a little excavating into our childhoods in hopes of finding undiscovered parts of ourselves that may be revealed as we dig through our pasts. She offers a statement and then encourages us to fill in the blank. And there was one sentence in particular that gave me pause…and offered me a memory.

The sentence was this: I am sorry that I will never again see _____.

I could have filled this blank with a hundred different names, but the first one that came to me was Mrs. Morris, my eighth grade English teacher. I’d always enjoyed the writing side of my english classes in elementary school. Words and stories were the invisible playground my imagination had provided me since before I knew how to write down the tales I told myself. But Mrs. Morris was the first teacher I had that drew the connection for me between the books we read in class—my favorite being Dicken’s A Christmas Carol—and my own ability to write books.

And so I wrote.

It was in eighth grade that my first ever novel, Letting Go, was penned. It was the intricate and over-blown story of a teen whose favorite uncle is diagnosed and eventually dies from cancer…or did he die in a car accident…maybe an incident at work…a plane crash? The years have all but washed my memory clean of the details, and to my knowledge every prized copy of the book is currently decaying in a landfill somewhere in midwestern Ohio, so I have nothing to reference.

But at the time, oh, the sense of accomplishment I had! The story had humor (not to toot my own horn, but I was a pretty funny kid,) romance (of course the main character fell in love with and was loved in return by the coolest, cutest kid in school), outrageous Christmas gifts (I have a vague sense that her parents gave out sports cars, gold jewelry, and concert tickets like Chiclets on her last Christmas morning with her ill-fated uncle,) and so much crying, weeping, sobbing, tearing up, breaking down, and every other synonym Merriam Webster could provide me.

Upon its completion, I mustered all the courage I could in my larger than average eighth grade body and approached Mrs. Morris’s desk after class one day, holding the plastic bound book in my hands.

“Mrs. Morris, I was wondering if you would want to read the book that I wrote?” I asked in a voice I am sure was just above a whisper. That was the only tone I used when speaking with anyone whose name began with Mr., Mrs., Miss, or Dr.

She looked up from her desk.

How old was she? I can’t for the life of me even begin to attach an age to her. She had short, brown, voluminous hair, the kind models would fluff their hands around on Nice n’ Easy commercials. And freckles! She was a middle-aged woman with a cheerful spray of light brown flecks all over her cheeks and nose, giving a perpetual childlikeness to her appearance. She was buxom, the perfect build for a storyteller, large enough to embody the stories she shared with us, but soft and sturdy enough to lean into when a tales got too intense. But her crowning glory was her joy. It radiated through her walk and talk…and smile, which she now offered me as I stood at her desk, my book hugged between my arms.

“I would love to,” she said.

She read it over the weekend and returned it to me the following Monday with a note attached to the title page. I don’t have the note anymore. I only remember the perfect penmanship of her cursive and the pure delight as I read her words.

I was a writer. A writer of books. And according to Mrs. Morris, I was good at it.

That would be the last contact I had with my artist child for many years. Somewhere in the eighth grade, I lost touch with her, and began keeping company with my Angsty Teenage Self instead…then the Anxiety-Ridden Twenty-Something Me…then the Exhausted and Overwhelmed Mommmy Version of Yours Truly in my thirties.

But then, something switched. In the my late thirties I began making contact with my inner artist child again, and on the morning of my fortieth birthday, I typed out the final words upon the first book I’d written in 27 years, titled The Puzzling Summer of Marigold Mathers. The book is still sitting as a file on my computer. A few friends and family have read it. It’s gotten mixed reviews. Most importantly, though, more books have followed. All still sitting on this computer, like little birds freshly hatched from their eggs.

In The Artist’s Way Cameron says that, “Art requires a safe hatchery.” I think that’s exactly what Mrs. Morris and others helped to build in me as a child: a quiet, warm, nourishing place where stories can glimmer and grow and eventually crack the shell into existence. For decades I lost the address to that space, but it feels good to be back here again. Sure, storms of self-doubt still rage around this little hatchery from time to time. Am I really a writer? Am I as talented as her or him? Will people think this is good?

But I don’t take the bait. I’m too old for teasing my bangs and pegging my jeans and trying to be a cool. I just want to write. So I stay here in the hatchery, working, writing, creating.

I thought about looking up Mrs. Morris. I’d even begun typing her name into my Google search bar, but then I stopped. I’ve had my fill of sad news these days. I know what Mrs. Morris did for me and I’m grateful. I’d like to believe she’s still somewhere in the world, using her freckled joy and notes written with perfect penmanship to build more hatcheries for more burgeoning writers. That’s a good story, right? A happy ending? I’ll go with that.

Now back to the writing.

Friend, I’d love to hear about your own experience with your “Inner Artist Child” and “Safe Hatcheries.” Do either of these concepts resonate with you? If so, what does your inner child love to create and who helped build a safe hatchery in your life? Feel free to share in the comments below!