Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Sunday afternoon, as I sat sifting through a trove of old paperwork, clippings, correspondence and miscellanea, sorting the essential from that to be shredded or recycled, I came upon a typewritten letter, which I had fielded in September 1996 during my stint as staff editor for a national gardening publication. I have re-created it here as faithfully as possible:
Why April should have singled out our magazine to send her query to, I cannot say. It’s possible that she sent a similar letter to other publications, but based on the evidence at hand, she likely would have typed each individually. I was duty-bound to inform her that it was not our editorial policy to accept poetry submissions, but I admired her forthrightness, and as I happened to be mentoring another young writer at the time, I decided to respond to her, though perhaps overstepping my bounds a little and perhaps sidestepping the notion that her letter, with its urgent postscript, and her poem — which we all can agree is a Plath-tastic bag of downers, right? — may well have been a cry for help.April [redacted]
[address redacted]
Dear Flower and Garden, and publishing,
My name is April [redacted], I am twelve years old, Ilive in [redacted]. I am a semi-finalist in a poem contest.
Would you be interested in publishing any of my writings.
I am submitting the poem I entered in the contest.Please look it over and tell me what you think. If you are not interested in any of my writings, please write me and tell me what I could do to be a better writer. Or any information would be helpful.
This is my poem.LIFE IS PAINFUL
Life is painful I should know,
As I stand on the edge I watch the river flow,
I outstretch my arm to hold the air,
I stick my leg out and yell lifes no fair,
As I hit the water I feel the cold,
Now I don’t feel so brave or so bold,
Life is different for everyone,
Now I know death is no fun.April [redacted]
[address redacted]
P.S.
Please Respond as soon as possible
This is very important to me.
I wrote her a letter of encouragement, identifying those things about her poem that I felt showed promise, then expounding at length about those habits and practices that make us better writers. And while I might have been in danger of talking out of my ass at the time, I’m happy to report that I still hold all those truths about writing to be self-evident. Those four-plus pages possibly overwhelmed her, but I hoped that they were also exactly what she had wanted to receive. I could only guess, though, as I never heard from April again — not so much as a “thank you” or a “screw you, mister.”
Anyway, fast-forward to the present: I’m sitting there Sunday looking at this long-ago letter, and it occurs to me to wonder whatever became of April and to what extent she may have pursued the writing life.
Naturally, I Googled her. It’s fascinating what you can learn these days with the click of a mouse.
April doesn’t appear to have strayed far from her tiny, rural hometown, even though it stands right alongside Interstate 95, which spans the East Coast from Woodstock, New Brunswick, to Miami, Florida, and is as good a jumping-off point as any for one seeking escape. In any event, she graduated from an area high school in 2001 and appears to have stayed put, more or less, taking up residence a couple of towns away.
There, according to the local paper’s police blotter, April was arrested in July 2006 on a charge of aggravated assault.
More interesting is April’s December 2009 arrest on a charge of domestic assault, preceded (nine minutes earlier, according to the report) by the arrest on a warrant of a man I’ll call “Mark,” who resides at the same address as April (though both arrests took place a few blocks away from said residence). It is unclear whether April and Mark are in a relationship or merely rent apartments in the same house, but Mark’s name turns up in police reports on two other occasions: an October 2008 arrest on a probation hold and charges of domestic violence, assault and “operating after habitual offender revocation”; and a January 2009 arrest for criminal mischief, for which he paid partial restitution of his $200 fine in a district court the following April.
It turns out that two other residents at that same address were arrested on warrants just two Sundays ago, while a third was arrested in April 2009 on a charge of “theft by unauthorized taking or transfer” at a local clothing store.
All of which paints a compelling, if incomplete, picture of the woman that thoughtful 12-year-old girl grew up to become. That April made a couple of mistakes along the way or may have fallen in with the wrong crowd doesn’t answer the original question so much as pose others.
Does she still write? Does she still aspire to poetry, or has she explored other means of expression? Does she at least keep a journal, as I once advised her to do? And what might one find in its pages? Is there any joy or wonder to be found there, or is it all just as bleak and lonely and troubled as that young girl contemplating the raging waters below?
Her transgressions of the last few years certainly point back to that supposed cry for help, a snapshot of a young girl in distress, a possible harbinger of things to come.
Then again, for all I know, April is perfectly content today in those little towns of her youth, a responsible, upright citizen despite her occasional brushes with law enforcement, and a shrewder judge of character than the rap sheets of her fellow tenants would imply.
At least, as Hemingway wrote, isn’t it pretty to think so?
