A yellowed bifold postcard with a headshot of Bennett Cerf sits in my desk drawer. Head cocked slightly above an impeccable white shirt and blue tie, he exudes confidence and success. He asks: Do you have a restless urge to write? If you do, here is an opportunity for you to take the first important step to success in writing. Inside, the esteemed writer and co-founder of Random House publishing claims We want to test your writing aptitude. And proceeds to expound on the benefits of the Famous Writers School. A small black and white photo, reminiscent of the Last Supper, shows a pantheon of writers including Cerf, Faith Baldwin, Bruce Catton, and Rod Serling, as well as others long since consigned to remainders piles or total obscurity. On the back are colored thumbnails of four alleged students—two men and two women, all Caucasian—headlined:
· Sells fourth book
· Sells 11 stories in 6 months
· Lands job as society editor
· Cracks science fiction market
Inside is the business reply card to request the aptitude test created by 15 Famous Writers. It was detached but never filled out.
After my father died, I found this card in the drawer of his battleship grey, utilitarian desk, while cleaning out the house I grew up in. He never pursued a career as a writer but would grace birthdays and other family events with the occasional doggerel. Graduations and other rites of passage were marked with a thoughtful letter, rare expressions of emotion. He started a blueprint business in the heart of the Great Depression, a path, he believed, that would provide security for his family. Over the next six decades, working tirelessly and bolstered by government contracts during World War II, he built it into one of the most successful businesses of its kind.
Although he never shared his dream with me, I knew from the time I was 10 that I wanted to be a writer. My parents, who didn’t believe college was essential for a girl, discouraged me and said if I must continue my education, consider either business or law so I would be able to support myself. Unspoken was that I wasn’t prime marriage material: too precocious and not sufficiently attractive by 1960s standards. They reluctantly supported my decision to go to journalism school as a compromise between my love of writing and the need to earn a living (sort of).
Graduating in 1972 when, thanks to Watergate, every boy and several of us girls aspired to be Woodward or Bernstein or both, newspaper jobs were prized and precious. Determined in my goal to be a writer, I took a tech writing job in a company of questionable ethics to pay the bills, accepting every freelance assignment I was offered by a local weekly. The paper eventually hired me, albeit at half of what I was making.
A move out of state put me back in the job market. After a stint in a bookstore where my pay kept going back into the shelves, I took public relations jobs, first with a utility then with a not-for-profit organization. Never mind that in journalism school we newspaper majors viewed the PR/advertising majors as just being there for the money, one step below drug dealers. At least I was writing.
Retirement brought freedom to write what I wanted: poetry, an occasional op-ed column, and articles for our local Humane Society newsletter. Today my desk is a jumble of papers, fetishes including Ganesha, the Hindu elephant god purported to cure writers’ block; and a laptop computer whose capabilities my father could never have imagined.
And in my desk drawer, that yellowed postcard on which Bennett Cerf asks Do you have a restless urge to write? I whisper, Yes, Mr. Cerf, I do.
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Marianne Gambaro’s poems and essays have been published in several print and online journals. Her chapbook, Do NOT Stop for Hitchhikers, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her career as a journalist is often reflected in the narrative style of her poetry. A committed humane volunteer, she does enrichment with stray and injured cats at her regional animal shelter, socializing them and preparing them for adoption. She lives, writes, and gardens in verdant Western Massachusetts, with her photographer-husband and two feline muses. https://margampoetry.wordpress.com/
© 2024, Marianne Gambaro
Halfway Down the Stairs 