Yep, that’s me. I’m Raechl, and, yes, that really is how I spell my first name. It’s different and unique and constantly has to be explained. Kind of like me. I’m a poet, author, teacher, mom, and wife. I grew up in New Mexico, and I currently write, teach, live, and love in Southern California.
While my passion for writing has been life-long, I have only recently chosen to share my work. I do so now to show my children that one is never too old to pursue one’s dreams, and to convince myself that I am courageous enough to truly bear my soul.
No matter our age, life is a journey. Thank you for sharing the road with me a while.
What do you do?
My mouth is sweating. Okay, technically I think the term is “salivating,” but that verb implies that I’m smelling my grandmother’s fresh-baked bread. Or digging my fork into a rich, dark chocolate tarte. Or watching my husband wash the dishes while wearing his blue button-down shirt and sexy jeans. Unfortunately, none of these delicious events are occurring, so I stand by my original verb.
My mouth is sweating so much, in fact, that drool is being produced faster than my ability to swallow, and I’m afraid that at any moment the drool is going to erupt out of the corners of my mouth and flow down the sides of my chin like gross, clear lava.
What triggered this impending slobber-volcano? My attempt to answer the question, “What do you do?” by applying one little label to myself: writer.
“Well, that’s ridiculous,” you might be saying. “Of course you’re a writer. You’re writing now, aren’t you?”
And the answer is yes. Yes, I am writing. Yes, I do write. But writing and calling myself a writer are two very different things in my, admittedly, odd-working mind.
Writing is something anyone with working hands can do. Writing is a fine motor skill that most of us acquired in kindergarten. (I apologize if these statements are insensitive to anyone who doesn’t have working hands or who had later-blooming fine motor skills. I don’t mean to be all elitist about my hand’s abilities.) Writing is a physical act that some people do for fun, many people do to improve their chance of getting hired – or at least not getting fired – and teenagers do because, they believe, their English teachers learned a particularly cruel form of torture during the Inquisition called “the essay.” Writing can be physically taxing and is very often nothing more than formalized lying, but it is common. Everyone does it.
The term writer, however, implies expertise. It implies talent and acumen. It implies membership in an elite club more powerful than the Masons, the Mafia, and the Illuminati, combined. The term writer implies that one is a magical wordsmith who can invoke intense emotion in the hardest of jaded hearts and provoke profound thought in the emptiest of apathetic minds. Writers are magoscribes who create worlds by arranging and rearranging ciphers on a page. Writers are people like Shakespeare and Austen and Bulgakov and Rosetti. How can I have the unmitigated gall to initiate myself into their society?
I realize, of course, that not all writers are as skilled as Marquéz or Atwood or Watterson. History is full of people who pen works that are very popular and who, I’m certain, wouldn’t be able to use a semicolon properly, even if the life of a loved one depended on it. (“You’ve got ten seconds to punctuate a sentence correctly, or your pet lemur gets it!” “Okay, okay! I think; this, is right?!” Pow! The Bad Grammar Bandit is now the proud owner of a new lemur scarf.)
Successful book sales are no indication of actual writing ability, but that just makes my predicament worse. What if I try to enter the Elite Authors’ Club, but I use the wrong password at the door, and instead of ushering me upstairs to associate with Dickinson and Morrison and Gaiman, the bouncer escorts me to the basement to wallow in popular-but-poorly-written shame with writers of stereotype-perpetuating self-help books and historical fiction with no basis in history?
Don’t misunderstand me; I am not comparing my abilities with those of Bishop or Collins or St. Vincent Millay. I don’t believe that I deserve to be in the penthouse suite of the Elite Authors’ Club – I’d settle for my own little corner of the kitchen. What I worry about is people reading my work and hating it. Or, worse, people reading my work and loving it for fifteen minutes until critical reviews blast me for being pedestrian and inane; after which, the public mocks me, and English teachers use excerpts from my books as examples of terrible writing and grammar.
What if my writing really IS just tales told by an idiot? What if I am full of sound and fury, but I actually signify nothing?
All of this is why I have such a hard time trying to label myself a “writer.” (Great, jut writing that caused my mouth to start sweating again. Maybe this oral flood is a reaction to my racing heart. Maybe my brain thinks my engine is revving too high, so it tries to flood my system with coolant to compensate. Is that how engines work? I really should look that up.)
Okay, I need to calm down (and wipe my chin). As my husband would ask: What am I going to do about the situation? Stop writing? Give up? No. I tried that, and it didn’t work out well for me. I spent years of my life not writing, and I was miserable. I felt as though I had taken a vital piece of my soul and locked it in a cage in a dark corner of a closet, and every time it pled for release or tried to escape, I just poked it with a sharp stick. No part of my soul wants to face that kind of treatment again, so not writing is not a viable option.
Hmm. What if I apply a different label to myself? What would seem less threatening than “writer”? Scribbler? Jotter? No, those are terrible. They make me sound like I’m a D-list villain in a 1960’s Batman cartoon.
I think I have a solution: I’ll simply refuse to use the noun. I won’t apply a label to myself at all. I’ll just use the verb and refer to myself in an active way. When people ask me what I do, I’ll say:
“I teach, and I write, and I mom, and I wife.”
Perfect! No racing heart, no near panic attack. Slobber-volcano successfully averted.