I have always been a writer. I haven’t always been a storyteller.

In the 7th grade, I had to write a report for my Social Studies class. It was one of those reports that seemed to take forever to write: like a whole two or three pages. I was in the library looking through encyclopedias and articles for any information I could find on Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

It must have been a position paper I was supposed to write, because I remember having to choose whether or not to call the PLO a terrorist organization. This is a decade before the phrase “terrorist organization” would carry such hefty political weight. And reading all of this stuff, it seemed clear to me that the PLO engaged in terrorism.

I also remember feeling conflicted, because Israel didn’t seem innocent in the whole thing. It mirrored the other bloody conflict in Ireland with the IRA. I could so clearly name them terrorists, but could not absolve the Crown from its actions against the Irish people.

I felt a deep sense of conflict about what I was doing. My assignment was to write about the PLO and come to a decision. What I was reading was both much more complicated than that, and much simpler. Were they terrorists, by definition, yes, but…

The assignment was both limiting and not directive enough. I was being taught how to synthesize my reading into an essay, using quotes and arguments. I know now what the teacher was after, but at the time, I was used to being told precisely what was needed. Three pages? OK. How many quotes must I include? How many sources? How do I cite them?

Who knows how I did on the paper. Not me. But this image I have of myself, in the library at Thunder Bay Junior High School is vividly out-of-body. I had so much to communicate and process, but no vehicle. Certainly not this paper with all its structure. I didn’t know how to write then. How to make it work.

It was high school when I became a writer. Ironically, in Germany at a writer’s workshop. For me, it was just a trip to Germany, an excuse to go with Joel, who would become my best friend for a time, and leave our parents at home. I was 15, buying wine and knackwurst from street vendors, and every day, we would gather for these workshops and talk about writing and I don’t remember when we would actually write. I don’t remember. That part is gone, not half as vivid as visiting the castles and walking the streets of Muhlhausen and seeing a book from the 13th Century, preserved under glass, and visiting Weimar and going to the national concert hall and seeing Goethe’s house and all of this history and thinking damn! this world is amazing!

At some point I wrote. At least two poems, I recall. Both with form. Sonnets. One was about a bug, I think.

And I remember being told by one of the directors that she really liked it. I had talent.

that’s it I thought I’m a writer

because I loved it. It was challenging in just the right way and easy enough to finish a poem and call it done.

When we returned to our home in northern Michigan and went back to our lives, I came back with a new identity: one I didn’t expect to have.

An identity that I hid, that I refused to trust, that has always been secondary to my life, but primary to my dreams.

Writers like to be dramatic about the place writing has in their lives. We like to compare it to drinking and breathing and walking. It is part of who we are. It is part of our daily struggle in the world and part of our very being in the world. Of course, to write that now is cliche, since we all feel that way. Can’t be that it is true. We’re too obsessed with originality to admit it is our nature. Or that our nature may be so common.

What we all share is a need to communicate.

It is something deep inside us all, not just those who call themselves writers. Something profound and powerful that we are all called to express. Some of us attribute that to GOD. Others to our humanity. But we have it. This deep need to be known and to know.

To express those 12 year-old thoughts about conflict and its futility. About the struggle to express such a thing in the form given; in a paper with all of its rules. Confined like the limits of the debate. Like the lives of people in occupied territories.

I write because things actually make sense to me, but they are all mixed up. The wrong people are doing the wrong things at the wrong times and I simply can’t stand it. I can’t do nothing. Or go through life isolated from our conflicts.

What I can do is untangle the mess. I can help more things seem right. Or righter.

I write because I breathe. And not everybody gets to.