SOMETIMES IT'S EASY

Let’s face it. Writing is a lot of work. We struggle to find just the right words to convey experiences and feelings, exhaust ourselves with possibility and nuance, all  in the effort to make something we hope is fine. And yet sometimes, without really thinking or trying, we say everything that needs to be said. When I received this email from Susie Moses, I saw a story tucked inside it. All she needed was a title. Discoveries like these remind me to appreciate moments in my own writing when the words just flow. Sometimes it’s easy to sing.

  Progress by Susie Moses

 Last week my nine-year-old granddaughter was describing a soccer practice she had attended and the expectations of her male coach.  I filled her in on how there were no such opportunities for me when I was her age. Only boys had organized sports and we girls were their cheerleaders.  She was blown away by this info, and yesterday while working on a writing prompt about her utopian world, drew a cartoon of a soccer field—for girls only—and a little figure labeled “guy” with pompoms aloft on the sidelines.  The soccer player on the field was labeled with my name. Rectification!  It’s a beginning.  I told her I thought she would change the world.  She replied with a simple, “OK.”

Susie Moses is the delighted grandmother to three young California girls. It is her great pleasure to witness their development in a world with far different expectations for females than the 1950s of her own youth. This theme recurs in her writing, unbidden, as illustrated in her piece published in Marlene Cullen’s anthology, The Write Spot: Writing as a Path to Healing.