That first summer, June 1968

 Welcome!!

On this site you will find work in progress and published work from the last fifty-five years. It is, in essence, an archive of published and unpublished work. I have tried to indicate the date each piece was first written and the date it was revised and published, either here or by some other means. This selection includes, or will include essays on education and nature, poems,  memoirs, travel logs, stories and random thoughts. There are  four  categories, including Memoirs, Nature, Nova Scotia and Travel. 

My literary career began in approximately 1946, when I became the editor of our school newspaper, The Mock Turtle. It was a proper newsletter, printed on rather dingy white paper by that modern wonder, a mimeograph machine with a hand crank, which tended to go rogue and spit either ink or paper around the room. But it was a proper Newsletter with a picture of the Mock Turtle  on the masthead borrowed from Edward Tenniel, and a byline from  one of the psalms, “…the voice of the turtle shall be heard in out land…”,  followed by volume, number and date. I was 13, the other reporters about the same age, level of skill in English, and sense of humor.

Kathleen Heidi Watts in Nova Scotia. Photo by Jimmy Karlin.

The Newsletter consisted primarily of two to three paragraph articles with announcements and very local news. “Four new calves were born this month. Their names are “Read”, “Mark”, “Learn” and “Inwardly Digest”. We think they are very cute.” Or: “Next Saturday there will be a special square dance with refreshments at 7:00. Don’t be late”. (The Arnold School was both a boarding and a farm school.) We had a teacher advisor, my mother, who made sure we used quotation marks and the objective pronoun properly, but otherwise The Mock Turtle was completely a student production, messy, irregular, dull to the uniniated, and we were very proud of it.

After that there was a long hiatus in my literary career. It is true that I went to college; I was an English major; I had to write a lot of papers; I read and deconstructed a lot of good writing and I become a compulsive journal writer with notebook after notebook filled with exclaiming, ranting, emoting, recording, describing and reflecting. These notebooks were all carefully stored away for the time when I would be old (maybe 60? ), bedridden and could mine them for the great American novel. However, at the time I did not aspire to write the great American novel. I was going to be a teacher. I became a teacher. I have loved teaching, and teaching about teaching to teachers, but in the course of  wandering around in the pedagogical business, back and forth between classrooms and university teaching, I was called to do some writing, primarily about educational issues. 

The real push to do something more came from the short happy days of Federal support for teachers’ centers in the late 70s and 80s. I was working in England in 1979 when a friend at the State Department of Education in Vermont suggested I look into the teacher center movement budding there. I did, I wrote about it, and after that, challenged and supported  by teacher center colleagues II wrote my first published piece and more followed. I began to think of myself as a writer and I began to take things which I saw or heard, and shape them into stories, strongly influenced by the story telling tradition in Nova Scotia.

After 1965 we spent our summers in Nova Scotia in a small island community of fisher folk where the story telling tradition was still alive and well. Though television had arrived with a different kind of entertainment for long dark evenings, there were stories told and retold until they became firm in the shape of their making and did not vary in word or emphasis. I took some of their stories, and some of my own experiences and made my own shape stories. I wrote and rewrote them, told them to myself,  told them to others, until now they are not memories but stories. They started in the lived experience, became a recounting and are now a thing of their own.

Subsequently,  teaching at SUNY Cortland and Antioch New England, I was pushed and pulled to do more professional writing, and I began to join locally organized, invariably supportive, small, informal writing groups where I was encouraged to mine, not the journals themselves, but the memories I thought they contained.

What appears in this blog is not the great American novel. It is a sampling of what has emerged from experiences recollected in and out of tranquility, (thank you, Mr. Wordsworth), some experiences quite recent, some from many years ago, some personal, some recorded nearly verbatim from the “yarns” I heard in our Nova Scotia fishing community.

In a poem called “Layers”, Stanley Kunitz says, “I have walked through many lives, some of them my own.” Here you will find a traveler’s commentary from that most unreliable source, the human memory. I have toyed with calling this idiosyncratic collection “Reflections in a Rear View Mirror” since all of it comes out of  experience I am looking back on even as I am facing forward. Here you will also find recorded conversations from some of those other lives I have wandered through, most notably amongst the fisherfolk in Nova Scotia, but as they have been seen with my eyes, and heard with my ears, not theirs.

And as for my own memories? I wrote a story called “Crossing the Desert” about a short period when I lived with a young person facing a schizophrenic breakdown. I wrote my entire memory of that 30-year-old event in 15 pages. And then, to check a few dates, I dug through my pile of old journals and surprise! I had two different stories. One was the immediate account, captured in the journals,  of my doubts, fears,hopes, anger, remorse, and relief. There were even some humorous or illuminating moments. The one I wrote 30 years after the fact, tempered by time and experience was a seasoned account: emotion recollected in tranquility, though still with the power to unsettle. The recollection was like a nice round of cheddar cheese, shaped, aged, redolent with description and metaphor, the other a bubbling pot of raw emotion.

John Dewey said, “Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.” Here I had two different stories, story had become reified by frequent retelling of an event, a feeling or an impression and then shaped by mind, memory and all my subsequent experiences. There is never just a present. There is all that has come before which changes and conditions the perception of what is confronting us in the present.

Reader be warned. These reflections in a rear view mirror are only that. Tomorrow the car will have traveled for 24 hours and the cop hiding by the culvert to catch me going over the speed limit has gone to some other culvert, the sunset lingering over the hills has been replaced by a sunset of another color. ‘No one ever walks in the same river twice.”

See also my soon to be published book; Some Wonderful -- for more of these stories collected together into one volume.

Heidi Watts, April 2022