Maleah: An Introduction to My Writing, In My Own Words

Trapping Life with a Word Net

I was tracing over-sized tropical flowers onto long strips of colored butcher paper, the kind you find on giant rolls in the faculty lounge, when Mrs. Wirthlin shouted to my best friend, “Lara, cry like you mean it.”

We were almost twelve, and Lara was starring as Dorothy in the annual sixth grade play. Mrs. Wirthlin explained to the preteen cast that Dorothy is a difficult role to play because she is a real, human girl.

“Sometimes it’s easier,” said Mrs. Wirthlin, her magnificent classroom voice always flowed with vibrato as though she were on the verge of singing about fractions in an opera, “to cackle like a witch, roar like a lion, or squeak like a munchkin than to cry, believably, like a real girl.”

My name is Maleah, and I write contemporary women’s fiction – the kind that chronicles real life and doesn’t have any heart-throbbing vampires or bare-chested Fabio’s.

If fiction gives readers a momentary escape from their reality, then why would anyone want to read fiction so real that it borders on being creative nonfiction?

Good question. Maybe nobody does. But I will write anyway, because

life is rich, messy, interesting, monotonous, beautiful, hideous, exhilarating, and devastating.

Life is so easy to complicate.

I must attempt to capture real life with words, like a child who chases a butterfly with a net, hoping to trap the graceful creature – not to cage, but to slow for a brief moment of closer examination, admiring its magnificent, yet delicate form. When the child releases the creature to again fly free, he barely feels the ripples in the air that softly kiss his cheeks, and then crescendo to form tsunamis on the opposite side of the earth.

This is my goal – to momentarily entrap and ponder the metamorphosis of the monarch life.

I will see you here on Smashing Stories every 10th, 20th, and 30th of each month.

maleah

post script–the child in the picture is mine, the butterfly is courtesy of photoshop.

That in a dust-covered cardboard box labeled “Maleah’s college stuff” is a rumpled newspaper article from the Salt Lake Tribune, April 27, 1994. The last sentence quotes me, a nineteen-year-old college freshman, and reportedly I said, “I have anxiety about writing and having people read what I write.”

So what, in good glory, am I doing on a writers’ blog?

For years, my fear of writing for the public overpowered my love for writing. (Yes, I am also in possession of an ancient cassette tape–press play and hear me as a squeaky-voiced, ten-year-old fourth grader declare, “I love to write; I want to grow up and write stories for people to read.”)

Now, I approach writing with a (somewhat) fearless disregard for public opinion–because, what the heck, I have:

* pushed a human the size of a seven pound bowling ball through a one centimeter bodily crevice without pain meds (not by choice…the first time) while naked from the waist down in a room full of strangers,

*slid to the cliff of mental reason and did not fall off the edge,

*watched every last penny of life savings slurp into a bottomless, black business hole,

*and returned each time, still breathing, still alive, and still mostly happy.

So,

I. Can. Write.

Michael Jordan said,
I’ve missed more than 90,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games, 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

If I need to invest 10,000 hours of practice in order to excel at writing, (thank you Malcolm Gladwell and Dr. Livingston, I presume) then, by golly, I’d better get crackin’!

Up, up, and away…

sincerely yours,

maleah

post script: here is the Vogue-worthy (so not!) photo of me that appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune next to the article, “Gang Presence Unnerves Residents” – not the article for which I was interviewed. Okay, Loraine, this is my bulbous-head-mini-feet mug. Let’s see yours!

By the way, this photo was the model for the new Maleah Bobblehead, available at Wal-mart this Fall (also, so not! phew).