WRITING ABOUT WRITING by Christina Franke

Writing about writing, writing as a little girl, before I can read, before I can write anything other than my name, my name, written out in full, painfully, unhappy that it is so, so long, so many letters to write, Maria Christina Franke, but at least not as long as my sister’s name, which still has the hyphenated second last name, Elizabeth Diana Franke-Ruta, the Ruta being a post office mistake, a small town on the Italian Riviera where my grandfather, a man I never met, my father’s father, lived and wrote, taking Franke-Ruta as his pen name, his name still popping up as a minor, very minor German writer of the 1930s.

Writing. My mother in the manic periods of her mental illness writing and writing, the typewriter clicking away as she writes short stories, some about us, about three children who live in Switzerland, the three children she sends to Switzerland to live with the German grandparents, the grandparents who had gotten out of Italy, walked out of an Italian jail in Lucca, the jailers not wanting them, this Jewish woman and her German husband, the writer, letting them walk, the jailers eating lunch in the next room, the cell door unlocked. Mother the writer sends us to Switzerland but we never get there, stopped by her mother at Ernst Stein’s Great Neck house with its white painted wooden paneling, so clean and glossy and beautiful. Writing as a little girl, scribbling lines across the page, just lines of scribble, “Look, Diana, I’m writing.”

Writing, my mother telling me how to write a story so that something that seems so hard is now easy, just tell the story to yourself and then write it, just write it, don’t worry, if you can tell the story, you can write it and I do and the little eight year old story I write about a donkey who did something I no longer remember, the story my mother helps me write, the two of us sitting in the rain drenched summer house in Inverness, the ferns wet and smelling of urine, everything wet, leaves dripping, the two of us against the world, safe in our little house, and she helps me write a story.

Writing in Mr. Trouse’s English class, writing about Macbeth, angry, furious, stubborn, twisting my hair into knots, sitting and refusing to write, then slowly, dragging my pen across the ruled paper, writing, writing about Lady Macbeth, about the words Mr. Trouse loved and so I loved too, writing about Lady Macbeth and her madness, pushing, forcing the words out, the writing rough and uneven, the pen tight, the ink spreading. And when Mr. Trouse comes to class the next day, holds up a paper and says to us, “What do you think of this?” and when he reads my writing and I think he is reading it to shame me and my anger, and when a boy raises his hand and says “It reads like honey,” and Trouse says yes, that’s what I thought too, I wonder how the words they hear are so different from the words I felt.

And summer, bored, lying on the couch, my little brothers and sister screaming, the ugly tract house, reading, reading Willa Cather, reading stories of Swedish pioneer girls and prairies, of wheat and sun and trains across the fields and I know that this is beautiful writing, that this is how I want to write.