Downsizing in advance of my move to Costa Rica has uncovered many gems that I had long since forgotten about. I’ll share some of them in future blog posts here.

 

It turns out that Mrs. Rossetti sent me the stories I wrote when I was her student in junior high. She liked them so much that she read them to her future students until she retired, and then she sent them to me, along with her Plain English Handbook (image below).

Mrs. Alpha Rossetti as I remember her

The Rossetti home in Cle Elum, Washington (years later)

The Rossetti gravesite

I have written about Alpha Rossetti many times before in blog posts, so I won’t rehash the information. (You can do a search on Alpha or Rossetti and find them if you aren’t already in the loop.)  Suffice it to say that she was one of my earliest cheerleaders when it came to my writing abilities and she paid for two years of THE WRITER magazine when I asked her to help me become an even better writer than I was at the time. I still dream of her occasionally and consider her one of my guardian angels, along with the Kelleys and my mom and dad and both maternal grandmas.  (One of the things I am going to love about Costa Rica is that they celebrate Dia de  los Muertos (Day of the Dead), as do most, if not all, Central and South American countries.  I don’t think we give our ancestors and the earth angels (yay-sayers) who have passed in our lives the accolades they deserve here in the United States.  I want to embrace the custom when I get down there.)

 

I have a stack of middle school/junior high essays I wrote, thanks to Mrs. Rossetti. And from this vantage point, they are primitive, but they are clever! Alpha kept asking me where I got my ideas, and I could never answer her. My ideas come to me almost like downloads from some mysterious place in the cosmos. Even claiming authorship feels somehow fraudulent, because what happens in my brain (creatively) just comes to me! In fact, when I try to conjure up something clever, it doesn’t work. It takes getting out of my own way for ideas to occur to me.

 

Oh, there are times (plenty of them) where I have to tweak what comes. For example, if I want it to become a poem, I have to massage it into various meters and rhymes. But the seed itself comes from “out there somewhere.”

 

Some people call what I’m talking about “inspired” (God-given). I’ll buy that as long as it isn’t an organized religion type of statement.  It is certainly Spirit-given. I don’t create it. I channel it. That’s the best way I can explain it.  And as I honed my writing skills, the channeling became more crisp and on point. That is, I deleted my ego from it to allow the ideas to speak for themselves.

 

Anyway, the essays Alpha left me are clever, as primitive as they are. The poems are deep, poignant, searching. I like them better than the humorous stories, although the humorous stories possess their own fractured charm.

 

Comparing them to how I write now is completely unfair.  I’m a professional now. I was a wet-behind-the-ears amateur back then, but Mrs. Rossetti saw my potential and encouraged me in the best possible ways. She was always my champion and in a later letter she wrote:

 

*sigh*

 

My first published piece (“The Real McCoy” in TV STAR PARADE January 1969 edition) happened when I was seventeen, about five years after these earlier pieces were written. (DeForest Kelley sent that one in for possible publication, and they jumped at the chance to publish it. I was over the moon; as I have stated many times in various inerviews, “my parents had to peel me off the ceiling!”)

 

So… how soon do you want to see them? I can scan them and put them in follow-up posts. Just let me know!