WHEN I WAS SEVENTEEN by Kisha Jarrett

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Ever since I was in fourth grade and I failed the writing portion of my Standards of Learning test out of laziness. Why out of laziness? Because the question was something ridiculous like, “What did you do for your summer vacation?” which I felt was a stupid and uninspired question. My response was pretty quipped.

“I went to the beach with my parents and little brother. I rode my bike around the neighborhood and the river, and read books all summer. Thank you for asking.”

I failed. That’s what I get for being a smartass. My parents were mortified and got me a writing tutor for the summer because I could re-test the writing portion in the Fall as a fifth grader. When I first met Mrs. Grant, I was embarrassed that I had to be there. She was a teacher at my dad’s school (he was a middle school principal, hence the mortification of his own child failing a SOL). But she was kind and to assess what the problem was, we talked for about 15 minutes and then she wrote four questions on the chalkboard and told me to choose one and write about it.

“Write anything?” I asked.

“Anything.”

Anything is so wide open. So vast, so big that it swallowed me whole. Anything was a great big world and I was so little.

“Does it have to be real or can I make it up?”

“It can be anything you want, you only have to answer the question by the end. If you don’t like the question that is asked, find another way to get to an answer through your writing.”

So, I picked a subject from one of the choices off the chalkboard and I started to write. And I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote. I wrote until the hour was up and Mrs. Grant told me that my dad was waiting for me. I said I wasn’t done with the story yet, and that I needed more time. She assured me I could finish next time. That one hour was all it took to hook me.

Mrs. Grant told my dad that there was nothing wrong with me or my writing abilities, in fact, I was an excellent writer, I was just bored. Her explaining that I could take something mundane and through writing, change the structure so that it would be exciting blew my mind.

When I was a senior in high school, I took Advanced Placement English in the hopes of placing out of Freshman English in college. I really shouldn’t have been in the class because I was a mediocre student who was well-read but tried really, really hard. Well, not really hard. I was good at pleading my case for re-tests and extra-credit. I was likeable. I was the class clown that was the teacher’s pet. An enigma of an enigma. I think people would have hated me more had I not been so self-deprecating about it.

Anyway, my AP English teacher was a beast. She HATED me. She’d ask questions of the class and I would say the right answer and she would ignore me only to hear someone say the answer right after me. I would then make a snide comment and have the people around me chortling with laughter, which was extremely rude of me, and she would ignore that too. No matter what I did (or didn’t do), no matter how charming I was, she was not about to let me slide. And there is nothing wrong with that. Everyone needs the hard-assed teacher to open their eyes to the fact that they won’t be able to get what they want all the time.

With the exception that this teacher told me I was a horrible writer. She said that sentence to me. One day after class when I went to talk to her about the F I had gotten on my Ethan Frome essay. She leaned into me with her cigarette and stale coffee breath told me I didn’t understand the short story (or the symbolism of that fucking sled) and that my writing, while I showed support for my argument, was horrible. My. Writing. Was. Horrible.

This destroyed me. Like totally destroyed. (And at this time, I was saying ‘like’ a lot, so I was really like, like really upset about it.)

Up to that point, that was all I had done. Write. Write in my little black leather journal short stories and poems and ideas and snippets of conversations to write into dialogue for a play. And this lady that has taught high school English for eons told me I wasn’t any good at it. She must know what she’s talking about, right?

I ultimately went to my tenth grade English teacher, who I had a great rapport with to commiserate and say maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a writer. Maybe I should just stop before I go waste a bunch of money in college. She encouraged me and wouldn’t let me be deterred by one naysayer.

Fast forward more or less twenty years and I’ve told stories all over the country for the Moth and Back Fence PDX and Seven Deadly Sins. I’ve written two screenplays. I’m currently writing my first novel.

Now, what if I hadn’t had a support system behind me when that teacher said that to me? What if I couldn’t go back to my ninth or tenth or eleventh grade English teacher, or to my parents, or back to Mrs. Grant to lift me up and push me to keep moving forward, even though the set-backs (because there will be set-backs). What if I was one of those kids that didn’t have a rather tough exterior? What if I took what this white teacher said to the only black kid in class as gospel? How many voices have we lost because those kids didn’t have someone saying, “go for it” behind them?

I say all the time that I’m really good at a lot of things but I’m not great at anything. Some of that is my own inability to just commit to one artistic form and ‘just do that.’ But sometimes, sometimes in the dead of night, in the dark crevices of my mind it’s that little sad sack devil clown voice a lá Pennywise telling me my writing is horrible. That I failed.

But sometimes failure is what keeps us going. What helps us evolve. What motivates us to find a better way, a better ending, a better story. Failing is what helped me become a writer. Failure pushes me to believe in myself even when the seemingly never end rejection letters flood my inbox. Because all it takes is one. One yes.

One person to say, “I see what you’re doing and I love it.”