Set Your Pen On Fire: Celebrate Your Otherness

Writers often feel as if they exist on the periphery of life.

Perhaps this is obvious to you, but it’s a revelation to me. 

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, in Pen On Fire: A Busy Woman’s Guide to Igniting the Writer Within, describes how writers often feel like they don’t quite blend in, like they are an “other” - an outsider looking on.  Writers are misfits trying to make sense of their world. 

I won’t lie.  I’ve always felt like I don’t quite fit in, but then, I just thought that I was an oddball.

As a little girl in Argentina, my brother and I were the only niños rubios in a world of brunettes.  Meme, my abuela, held us up so strangers could pat our golden blonde heads, just like toy poodles. ¡Que Lindos!

When we moved to the US, I didn’t speak a word of English in an American public school.  I didn’t speak the language, and I didn’t understand the culture.

As an Argentinean, I expected to greet friends with a kiss on each cheek.  But, my 7-year-old friend explained, Americans don’t kiss.

A lifetime later, I’m never quite sure whether to kiss, or not, and is it one kiss, or two?  This confusion leads to embarrassing accidents, where you make a wrong turn and nervously kiss someone on the neck, or worse.

By the end of the school year, I spoke American fluently, and I knew not to kiss friends, but we kept on moving from school to school in the Washington D.C. border states, before relocating to Puerto Rico.

Entering 6th Grade in San Juan, I barely spoke Spanish, and an Argentinean Spanish at that.  Over the year, I learned about guaguas, churros and chicharrones.  I discovered new friends and unprecedented freedom, but we weren’t there long enough to be anything other than outsiders.

In June of 1977, we moved to another Caribbean island - St. Thomas, USVI.  My parents still have this house, and it is where I put down my deepest roots.  Thirty years later, this is the place that I call home.

And there I was, entering Junior High School, a white Argentinean-American-Puerto Rican girl in the stew pot that is the US Virgin Islands.  Yeah, you could say that I felt like an “other.”

So, what do you think?  Which comes first: the writer or the otherness?

Pen On Fire Journey

In January, I made a Resolve To Write and gave myself permission to Steal Time for my dream because it’s never too late to be A Writing Late Bloomer.

I flexed my writing muscles on vacation in Travel Learning: The Art of Observation and then took shameless advantage of my children to describe the beauty of a Winter Wonder: Through a Child’s Eyes.

Preparing for more ambitious projects, I gathered my online tools and made a list Regarding Research.    And then, I was stuck on an endless replay while Teaching My Pen To Listen. 

Fortunately, I joined the Home Educator Writers Group, and now I’m back to cranking out the stories.

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