Read Online Walk like a Man by Robert J. Wiersema - Free Book Online Page B

do in return for the violence done to me. I wrote about the mass murder of my tormentors, about torching the school, and about being “saved” by the girl who I had an incredible crush on.
    When I was falling in love, I wrote love stories. When my heart was broken, I wrote sad stories. 6 When I was close to graduating, I wrote stories about kids leaving home or living out their last summers in their small hometowns. 7
    I’d chosen UVic because it had the best creative writing program in the province at that time. 8 I had no vision of any future except that of being a writer. I didn’t have the faintest idea what that might actually be like, except that there would probably be girls and I’d finally be popular. But I had to know. I had to know whether it was just a silly dream. I needed someone to tell me that I was on the right track.
    So I asked the gypsy.
    My French teacher looked at the cards carefully, then looked at me.
    â€œAccording to the cards,” she said, “you’re going to write a lot. A lot of short things. And it looks like there’s a chance you’ll be very popular very fast.”
    I could feel my blood starting to rise.
    â€œBut,” she said, and I cooled, “if you don’t have that early success, you’re going to have to wait a long time. Ten years? Maybe more?”
    She tucked the cards away, and we never spoke of it again.
    Was she just being kind, and telling me what I wanted to hear while tempering it with caution? Was she just not very good at the whole tarot thing?
    Or was it, in fact, my fortune? That I’d either make it right out of the gate or spend a long time trying?
    I went to UVic and joined the creative writing program. I wrote stories and short plays, submitted things to magazines. I read voraciously, and I wrote for The Martlet, the student newspaper. Cori and I were seeing each other by that point, and she would take photos for my newspaper stories, and edit my fiction.
    That instant success? It seemed to be a while in coming.
    I transferred out of the creative writing program and into English. I wrote, a lot, keeping Cori busy with her red pen. I got a job in a bookstore. I read like a fiend. I submitted my stories around.
    Still no instant success.
    And somewhere inside me, a clock was ticking.
    I graduated, and got caught up in the day to day, in work, in being married. The writing slowed down, then all but stopped.
    The complacency of comfort.
    I missed my window. I turned twenty-five, then twenty-six. Too old to be a wunderkind.
    And then I got fired.
    I could be colloquial and coy and say “I lost my job,” the one that I missed my convocation for, the one I chose over my honeymoon. But no, this is no time for coyness: I got egregiously shit-canned, there one minute, gone the next.
    The following morning, I got out of bed and started writing a short story, the first story I had started in years. It was a story about pregnancy and childbirth, a mythic tale focusing on the male journey through what is usually seen as exclusively a women’s experience.
    After I finished that, I wrote a novel.
    And then another short story.
    And another.
    And then Cori got pregnant. I responded to the news by going a little insane and channeling all of my fears, all of my worst-case scenarios, into a manuscript about a little girl who gets hit by a truck.
    Before I Wake was written in a white heat of fear over the first three months of 1999. I wrote it longhand, in the study of our new house, smoking cigarillos with the side door open in the middle of winter as I scrawled into my notebooks.
    Once it was written, I left it. The notebooks sat undisturbed for a couple of years. There was no rush to go through the agony of transcribing it onto the computer: no one was waiting for it, and it was such a bizarre story it’s not like anyone would be interested in publishing it anyway.
    Eventually, though, I buckled down and did the typing.