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I drove six hours from Leland, Michigan to Chicago to spend  time with my new granddaughter and immediately got the cold from hell which banned me from any further contact. The nadir was a lunch at Gibsons when I sat alone at a separate table while my son and daughter-in-law sat with the baby, I believed far from anything infectious but apparently the entire restaurant was considered too close. I was told I didn’t respect boundaries and other awful ways that boomers violate the code of millennials. I spent a day crying and then, as this cold worsened, realized I was in fact, sick. 

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I’m waiting to hear whether a good publisher, a dream editor, actually wants my novel tentatively titled The Heart Wants What it Wants. The title is inspired by Emily Dickinson and, as it turns out, Selena Gomez. I feel like killing myself. I can’t write, I can’t focus, I’m angry and sad and certain I’m going to get my own heart broken. Again. I keep choosing parts of the book to reread and then I think, “Jesus, I suck,” or “Hey, I’m brilliant,” but neither is true and I’m tired. My husband tries to be supportive but he has no idea what it means to write books and wait and wait and then discover whatever it was you thought you’d managed to accomplish could be dismissed in a sentence: “Not what we’re looking for.” “Ultimately, I remain unmoved.” “Molly has such a unique voice but our list is full.” Yadda, yadda, yadda.

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Why did I become a writing coach? Because I had my first teaching job at Brooklyn College and was faced with a classroom of Haitian immigrants, I needed to learn how to teach writing. Not literature analysis, reading, or grammar. Writing using those aforementioned subjects, a sense of humor, a willingness to learn on my feet, and a deep empathy for my students struggling to remain in the United States, take care of their families, and find jobs. They wrote about these things, and I found work by James Baldwin, Hemingway, Tillie Olsen, and articles in the newspaper, stories about assimilation, loss of home, and identity. We wrote and we read and I corrected their essays and found forms like letters home, poetry, and storytelling that helped them become better writers. I learned the teaching of writing is an extension of voice which is personal, unique and easily silenced or distorted. I loved that work. I still do.

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