This is personal…
We asked advocates to submit stories about how the arts have personally impacted their lives. We’ve chosen our favorites to share each day during Arts Advocacy Week 2020, to show legislators that ALL South Carolina citizens have a dog in this fight.
The Art Of Writing Gave Me A Life
I’m often asked to explain the writing life. What’s writing like? How did you become a writer? For a long time I couldn’t explain my path to writing or its randomness, difficulty, and purity. On assignment to write about waterfalls long ago, I finally found my elusive answer.
“In the Cherokee’s Great Blue Hills of God,” I wrote, “rivers thunder over the Blue Ridge Escarpment. Waterfalls pound the rocks, kicking up mists, which receive treasures from wayward winds—fern spores from the tropics. The lucky ones fall into moist, fertile niches and bless the hard gray rocks with green riches. The others perish.”
I, too, was windblown, a spore who found a hospitable niche. Many times I have renewed myself through writing, Resurrection Fern that I am.
I became a writer and let me tell you a good week of writing is dreamlike. Freedom. No meetings. Morning sunlight streams in as New Age strains fill the air. A candle burns softly. A rose the color of coral begins to open on my desk. From a fountain, the glassy crash of falling water—a sound older than mankind—floods the room with serenity. At my fingertips lies mankind’s crowning achievement: language. What power it possesses.
The art of writing changed my life because it gave me a life. I was destined to become a mechanic or a changer of tires. Instead my writing appears in magazines and newspapers throughout the South, and my books include South Carolina Country Roads, Georgialina, A Southland, As We Knew It, and The Last Sunday Drive, and Carolina Bays—Wild, Mysterious, and Majestic Landforms. I even wrote a play. Swamp Gravy, Georgia’s Official Folk Life Drama, staged it, Solid Ground. I didn’t expect that but the columns I write about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and culture led the Swamp Gravy people to me.
No one expected these things of me as I was growing up in the rural south in Lincoln County, Georgia, a good place where the people are solid South. Still, cows outnumbered the people and the world of pastures and pine forests was light years from the life this boy imagined. The seed to write was in me, unplanted. I went on to graduate from the University of Georgia with a degree in Journalism and a master’s in Media, but I didn’t pick up the pen for a long time. Instead, I taught at the college level for five years. Then I got a break. I landed a job as a scriptwriter. That seed sprouted and it led to magazines and those led to books and the books led to speaking engagements, more assignments, and interesting places and people.
The art of writing took me places I’d never thought possible. The home of a rock and roll star, Chuck Leavell, one time of the Allman Brothers and now with the Rolling Stones. I interviewed Paula Deen in her palatial home and became friends with James Dickey and Pat Conroy. I wrote speeches for two South Carolina governors. Wrote a speech for Bill Gates. Had my Southern Writer logo on a racecar. Even marketed a brand of moonshine based on a story I wrote. I corresponded with the great James Salter.
The art of stringing words together led me to the SC Humanities Speaker’s Bureau. Then in October 2018, Governor Henry McMaster conferred the Order of the Palmetto upon me. Well, I never expected that but the art of writing delivered it, but what matters, what looms big for me is hearing from my readers. Hardly a day passes that I don’t hear from a reader eager to tell me that something I wrote touched them, that my words gave them hope or brought back a precious memory. “Some day I hope to write also,” they often say, and I hope they do. It might change their lives too.
My address says I live in Columbia, South Carolina, but that’s not true. I live in “Georgialina”—my name for Georgia and South Carolina, the two states that opened the door to writing and its ability to make inroads into others’ heart. I do a lot of book events. Sometimes I wear a leather and pewter bracelet to my book signings. Engraved into it are two words, “Words Matter.” When it finally wears out and it’s getting close, I’ll get another one with five words etched into it, “The Art Of Writing Matters,” and it does. In a big way. I wouldn’t trade my love affair with words for anything.
Tom Poland
