Biography - SHERRY CLEMENTS

In 1963 when I was five years old, my mother taught me to read and I have lived in the world of books ever since. The only thing I can remember ever wanting to be was a writer. When I was in the first grade, my parents joined a fundamentalist Christian religion that forbade contact with people or activities outside the church. Anything that was considered "worldly" was forbidden for my family. If my parents could have afforded it, we (their children) would have been sent to Buckeye Christian School. I have a friend who graduated from there without learning to add and subtract anything over the number ten, but she was clear on the ten million ways you could get to hell, so you can see the kind of place it was. For some reason unknown to me, my parents did not scrutinize what we read and even provided transportation to the library. Books were as important to my survival as food.

In spite of being a smart kid, I did not do as well as I could have. In the early grades I balked at doing any assignment that did not make sense to me. In the third grade at a new school, I was given a worksheet and told to write my name at the top of the page, which I did. I proceeded to the questions. Question number one said "Write your name." I had just written my name. Why was I supposed to do it again? I sat there and stared at it trying to figure out the trick. I never got past the first question. This led my new teacher to the conclusion that I was slow, and she decided I should be traded with another teacher. She sent me across the hall to knock on another teacher's door. It was like fetching the gun for my own execution. I got confused and knocked on the wrong teacher's door. Soon all the third grade teachers were out in the hall trying to sort it out, further evidence of my incompetence. It didn't take me too long to figure out that what I needed to do was please the teacher, no matter if it didn't make sense to me, and I did that for as long as I could. All the while I kept reading and writing on my own.

By the time I made it to junior high school, my very presence seemed to offend my teachers and I gave up on pleasing them. I didn't have the right clothes, lived in the wrong part of town, and was failing several subjects, which they seemed to think I was doing to insult them. My English grades were horrible, and I never could figure out

I couldn't be a writer. When I walked into an honors math class, Mrs. Piercy looked me up and down and said "you don't belong here." Nevertheless, I made it through junior high. My parents had given up on trying to convert me by then, and I was free to do whatever I wanted. It was a short distance to drugs and alcohol. I made an attempt at high school, but it was huge and I was lost. I was too frightened of the school and the cruelty in it to keep trying, and there was no one there to help me. Drugs, alcohol, and the other misfits who couldn't "make it" in school were more attractive than attending a school where I felt insignificant. Finally I missed so much I was permanently expelled in the tenth grade.

Fast forward a few years. I worked at a car wash, as a maid cleaning rooms at the Day's Inn, at fast food joints. I figured out I could do better with a GED so I signed up at the local Vo-Tech, got the GED, and learned how to type. I spent many years working in offices typing other people's words. I took some classes at the local university, and didn't do much better in Freshman Comp than I had done in Junior High English. I still wanted to write, but was scared to try. What if I couldn't do it? I even went so far as to sign up for a creative writing class at the university. We sat around and read published stories and critiqued them. We didn't do any in-class writing. I quit when I figured out I was expected to turn something in. I just couldn't do it. Eventually, I was able to work my way to some wonderful jobs, but I was always ashamed of my lack of education.

Finally, when I was in my mid-thirties, I remarried after being a single mom for many years. Soon I moved with my new husband to Washington State. We decided that it would be a good time for me to become a full time college student and take care of that unfinished business. There was a school nearby, The Evergreen State College, which I had heard was one of the best schools on the west coast. The advisor suggested I start out in a core program with freshmen students because, as he said, "Evergreen is probably not what you're used to."

I registered late and signed up for the only core program left "American West: As Image and Reality," taught by Brian Price, Matt Smith, and Rita Pougiales. It incorporated literature, history, anthropology, geology, and a whole lot of writing. Soon I was assigned the first essay. It was difficult for me, but I had plenty of help. There was a how-to writing class every Friday that only a handful of students showed up for. I learned about something called freewriting. I learned that there are ways to get unstuck. It was a battle and I was always afraid. I knew I couldn't be a successful college student if I couldn't write, so I just kept trying. In the last quarter of the year, each student had to choose a special project: writing, photography or bird watching. I was tempted to choose the bird watching because, well, you got to be outside watching birds, but I stuck with writing. Modeled after the Bay Area Writing Project, the students who chose writing got together once a week, did some writing in class, and learned how to listen and respond to each other's writing. I received much encouragement from my peers. Then all the students in the program were given the assignment of writing an essay for a book we planned to produce for the class. The theme for that quarter was "Living Deliberately in Time and Place" and that was also the theme for the essays. For the first time I was told to put myself in the writing. Sounds simple enough, but up until that moment I had always been asked to do the opposite: take myself out of the writing. This instruction turned out to be the single most important thing that anyone had ever said to me about writing.

I wrote my essay about the experience of leaving Arkansas, the place where I had always lived, and moving to Olympia, Washington, which seemed like the edge of the world at that time. I took my essay to the writing tutor, a young man who seemed to be about the age of my teenaged daughter. I couldn't stand to watch him read it, so I went and hid in the bathroom. When I went back, he had finished reading it and he said, "This is stunning." That was my beginning. I found my path again, the path that I had left many years before. Looking back, I wish that I could have figured out on my own that I could write, but I needed outside reinforcements. I needed to practice. I needed someone to say, "You can, and here's how." That's exactly what I got.

About a year and a half later, I walked across the stage and received my diploma. I was nine months pregnant, but that was not all that was developing. Today my son is three years old. I'm still writing, and I've started publishing. I'm working on an MFA degree in creative writing at Goddard College. I'm the first person in my family to receive a college degree, and soon I'll have two of them.