Carol Worthey

The Author

Why I Write

Life is lived by people. This seems obvious, doesn't it. Have you ever wondered — seeing some person walking by you, a total stranger — what their life is like, now and in the past? Does that person seem like a Story on Legs to you? That's how I feel, wherever I go. It's not that I'm nosey in a rude, uncaring way, but I can't help but CRAVE to reach out, embrace them with at least a gentle hello and say, "I want to connect! Tell me something you've lived through and survived! ...Can I help?" No one is alone, but so often we feel isolated, fearful to reveal our essence and our woes. Each of us is a loner longing for connection, for someone to love... who loves us.

Well, I decided long ago that, no matter what happened to me, I needed to make it through the physical or emotional pain of it. I would not only be a Survivor, I would somehow end up a Conqueror Who Cares! This is why I write. To touch others, to embrace all of life so that Strangers become Fellow Travelers, each with their own Story to share! Then I might feel that I have not lived in vain.

All this began with Reading. I taught myself to read at two years old, even though most of the newspapers in my grandpa's work-worn hands were Yiddish in Hebrew letters.... I found English somewhere and figured out that these odd-looking symbols were "short for sounds of words."

When I was forced at the age of three to leave the cozy tenement home of my grandparents at the close of World War II, I found myself in a troubled home, with Oil & Water parents, a genius father who told fabulous bedtime stories and spent hours playing tortured but gorgeous piano music to have some time alone from a troubled wife who resented her decision to get married instead of signing the Hollywood contract she'd been offered.

Reading became my escape! Walking to the library was a pilgrimage to a haven of quiet contemplation and magical discovery! Opening a book, I felt myself walking onto the planks of a ship bound for adventure or perhaps taking a shovel made of revelations to dig deep into the very heart of me! Nearly every day I trundled back home, my arms weighed down with book-treasures. Reading was my "escape mission", along with drawing incessantly and creating melodies and harmonies for the tunes to lathe in, so as to wash away all tears in the evanescent beauty of music!

As a voracious Reader, I would sneak a flashlight under my covers or hide in the closet to finish a book. By seven I had devoured most of Dickens and Gone with The Wind. Words fascinated me, and I began reading the dictionary to pinpoint the exact meanings an author had discerned were specific and perfect, and also to savor the subtle mists emanating from mystical phrases. Words were CLUES, hints, arrows aimed at bulls-eyes of situations and feelings. I ate words and phrases like whole dinners. My life as a young Jewess changed forever when I found The Diary of Anne Frank in the school library. Why didn't anyone tell me about this?

And so I write to put TRUTH there, to expose lies in as palatable way as possible.

I began with poetry, because I believe that Poetry Is The Breathe of The World (as I expressed in my poem of that name) something that all cultures and all languages throughout the turmoil and triumphs of history have left as Witness, since poetry, I believe, aspires to attain to be as close to the power of Music as any words can be. Later on, graduating my private school, I won the Poetry Award.

But let me go back to why it has taken me long decades of living and learning and suffering and thriving to take my love of words, my passion for stories, my aching need to reach out to others to become... me? What? An Author? YES!!

Here's what stopped me for years: At age seven my teacher assigned the class to write a story. I went home, pulled out some lined paper and suddenly I was not at my desk, I was not a seven-year-old Jewish girl in Providence Rhode Island, I was a Native American girl with long black braids, leather suede and beaded top and soft boots. The moon shone so bright that I had awakened and, entranced by the moonlight, had left my teepee, tiptoeing over near the Chief's tent. Suddenly I heard whispers, tense altercations, occasional shouts. I was riveted, scared, but thrilled with the tension, unable to move back to my tent. The Chief and young warriors were arguing: "We must fight! This is OUR land!" "No, war is not the answer, for they will kill or take our women and our babies."

I gasped, leaning close to the tent opening. Oh no! I was discovered." (What happens next in the story that I wrote at seven, living the experience so vividly that I can recall every detail to this day, what happens next in the story... I cannot recall.)

But what I recall is that the day after I turned in my story, my parents (both genius Dad and troubled Starlet Mom) called me into the living room. "Your teacher called us," said my father. "She accuses you of plagiarizing that story! She says that 'No child of seven could have written that story!' ...What is the truth, Carol Lee?!"

My parents believed me, but the wound had been stabbed into me. It was dangerous to mind-beam over to another time and place, to become another character, to watch while unspeakable or beautiful things happened, to try to word the EXACTITUDE of location, character, mood, action, outcome!! It was dangerous!

I continued to read, I continued to write homework assignments, occasionally I could not hold Inspiration back far enough from my pen and paper: Poems arrived in my universe, I became even more fascinated with the meaning, the strength or delicacy of Words, but ME A WRITER?? No!!

I trotted off to University, composed music, absorbed insights about parts of the world that had not been introduced to me yet, painted and studied Art History, and... one early evening, in my dormitory suite bedroom, I got a call!

My genius Dad had left his body and floated off no one knew where... this is how I feel death happens, sometimes not gently at all. My beautiful father, businessman, mathematician, philosopher, self-taught pianist and painter, poet too, storyteller sublime was... DEAD!

I cried all the way home that night, attended the funeral, grabbed one of Daddy's paintings as a memento for the candlelit shrine I visited in my heart. But it was time for Final Exams in my Senior Year. Forcing myself to return to college and graduate (to honor my father, more than for myself) I returned, took the exams and graduated. On the train home, I wrote a poem to salve the wounds. Many years later I realized that my Father, genius though he be, had not put forth his bedtime stories. I took it upon myself to give the world his stories.

Even though I could only recall one story about a mischievous crumb in a kitchen in love with a curvy spoon, I began writing and the plot and characters lived in me and dived into the paper to tell me what they DEMANDED I write. The result was Crumb: The Secret of The Riddle. An actual novel of 433 pages!

Now I have expiated the curse cast upon me as a Plagiarizing Wicked Child! I write, I reach out and touch strangers and friends alike, and I say to them, "Tell me your stories! Share! You are not ephemeral "here-today, gone-tomorrow"! You are living beings who count in the countless chronicles of time and civilizations! You are Walking Stories! Walk my way."

So that is WHY I WRITE. For is it not apparent that...

"We are echoes of all the old stories. We are promises still yet to come, and we sing to our young so they understand that some things will always be true." ^*

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