“Creative Legacy” by Mary Potter Kenyon
In Madeleine L’Engle’s A Circle of Quiet, the author chronicles a period of angst in her writing life. She’d hit a dry spell for sales of her work in her thirties. She was looking forward to her fortieth birthday, certain that a new decade would bring about writing success. It plagued her that she’d spent a great deal of time writing without pulling her own weight financially. She was working at her desk on the milestone birthday when yet another rejection arrived in the mailbox. She took that as a sign she should stop the foolishness of writing and become a good New England housewife who baked cherry pies.
Covering the typewriter in a grand gesture of renunciation, she paced the room, sobbing and weeping, utterly miserable. She stopped wailing long enough to realize that all the while she’d been crying, her subconscious mind had been busy devising a way to work her failure into a novel. She uncovered the typewriter and recorded that epiphany, realizing that even if she never had another book published, she must write.
So, it is with me. I garnered my first writing clip in 1988, shortly after giving birth to my fourth child. In the ensuing years I gave birth to four more children and began homeschooling. I continued to hone the craft, seeing very little monetary reward but certain my sanity depended on the creative outlet. I worked writing around caring for babies and toddlers; getting up before sunrise every morning to squeeze in an hour of wordplay. When an infant fell asleep in the car, I’d pull over to the curb and scrawl in a notebook I carried in my purse. I’d sit on the lid of the toilet and compose while toddlers splashed in the bathtub. I’d eagerly volunteer for child bedside duty so that I could finish up an essay by the dim glow of a nightlight.
It wasn’t long after my husband David’s cancer diagnosis in 2006 I pondered how I would write about it. How else, but through writing, could I bear the possibility of losing my life’s partner? My husband did not begrudge the moments I spent hunched over a legal pad as he lay in a hospital bed for eleven days, recovering from surgery. He appreciated my presence, and would fall asleep holding one of my hands, while I wrote with the other. I continued writing as I kept him company during his Wednesday chemotherapy sessions. By the end of his treatment, I’d completed a manuscript chronicling our shared journey through cancer and the subsequent revitalization of our relationship.
Four years later, I blogged my way through my mother’s lung cancer treatment. She died on my birthday in November 2010. Owning little in the way of material things, she’d beautified her surroundings with the art she created. It was her remaining pieces we coveted; paintings on canvas and barn boards, woodcarvings, teddy bears and quilts fashioned from scrap fabric.
As the writer in the family, I became the “keeper of her words,” inheriting many of her notebooks and journals. The written messages she left behind clearly indicated one of her life’s greatest desires was that her children and grandchildren would utilize their God-given talents.
Mom’s words became a catalyst of change for me. I recalled then how she’d snuck a Big Chief writing tablet in my drawer when I was ten, that she’d saved the handmade books I’d put together in grade school. Though I’d been writing for more than twenty-five years, in the months following my mother’s death, I embarked on what would become one of the most creative periods of my life up to that point.
Several times a week that winter my husband would offer to watch the kids, hand me a mug of hot tea and shoo me out the door to my mother’s empty house. I spent many hours there, my private writing retreat, finding the solitude and silence I’d craved for so many years. Lighting a cinnamon candle and popping Kenny G into the CD player of my laptop, I’d sit at my mother’s table writing for hours, pausing occasionally to stretch and rifle through boxes of her possessions. I accomplished more writing in those three months than I had in the previous three years, grief the impetus to taking my writing seriously, the legacy of a creative mother my muse.
Even after the sale of the house, the creative fire that had been ignited in me continued to flame. The following summer, with my husband’s encouragement, I attended my first writer’s conference. By early 2012, I’d begun teaching coupon workshops and obtained a literary agent who pitched my ethnographic research on the cultural phenomenon of extreme couponing. My husband reveled in all of it, driving me to presentations to claim a seat in the back of the room. During my first scheduled workshop, as I worked the room animatedly, my glance landed on David. My breath caught in my throat at the look of utter adoration on his face.
“I loved seeing you that way,” he commented on the way home. “Following your passion and coming alive in front of an audience. You’re flying.”
When I was hired to do a weekly newspaper column, David drove me to their photo studio for pictures, waiting two hours for my reappearance. In the car on the way there, we’d chuckled at the incongruity of someone like me experiencing a photo shoot. On the way home, David roared with laughter when I described how the photographer had playfully called out “Work it, girl,” to help me relax. We talked about the speaking opportunities that were coming my way as a result of the workshops and column.
“This is just the beginning for you,” he proclaimed. “It’s your time to soar.”
David had become the wind beneath my wings, seeing in me what I never imagined for myself. I reminded him I couldn’t do any of it without his support.
And then, I had to.
In March 2012, I found myself sitting at my husband’s hospital bedside once again, this time as he recovered from a heart attack. Our grandson was in another hospital eighty miles away, fighting an infection from the round of chemotherapy he’d just endured for a reoccurrence of the cancer he’d been diagnosed with a month after my mother died. As I frantically scribbled on a legal pad, David leaned over the side railing of the bed and groggily commented, “I don’t know how you do that.” Ashamed, I stopped writing mid-sentence. What kind of wife writes while her husband lay recovering from surgery?
“I’m sorry, I was working on my column that’s due tomorrow. I can work on it later in the waiting room while you take a nap.” I started to shove the pad into a tote bag when his hand on my arm stopped me.
“No, don’t stop. I meant that I don’t know how you can write like that; filling pages with words so effortlessly. You have such talent.”
“It’s what I do. I write,” He nodded at my simple reply, and my eyes filled with tears at his understanding. It spoke volumes of my husband that he could even begin to understand the pull of the pen when few non-writers do.
Less than two weeks after that hospital encounter, my beloved husband died in his sleep. The next morning, fingers thick and clumsy with grief, I penned one of the most difficult pieces of writing I’d ever done; my husband’s obituary.
It would have been easy to give up the pursuit of publication in the face of extreme loss. Instead, remembering the look on David’s face at my workshop and his words in the hospital, my writing became frantic, fueled by pain and a renewed determination. A corner of the couch became a paper nest. I’d sit for hours, surrounded by piles of papers and books. I journaled, blogged, wrote essays, polished one manuscript, and began another. At some point, I wondered how anyone navigated the labyrinth of grief without pen and paper.
Seven months after his death I signed a contract for the book that had been my husband’s idea in the first place. By the time it was released in 2013, my eight-year-old grandson was also dying.
I’ll never forget that July day when I stood before a Barnes & Noble window display of my book, completely devoid of emotion. I felt nothing, numb with cumulative grief. In the ensuing six years, I’d sign five more contracts, becoming less anesthetized with each book’s release.
In February 2017, emotionally spent, I revisited my mother’s notebooks. I’d just quit a job that should have been perfect for me; getting paid to sit in an office every day and write for a newspaper. Instead, it felt as though the work was stealthily killing me. I thought I might scream if I had to sit through one more supervisor’s meeting or write yet another corn or beef report. The human-interest stories I loved were few and far between. My jaw and hands ached from unconsciously clenching them. My eyelid wouldn’t stop twitching. I hadn’t written anything outside newspaper reporting for more than a year.
I unearthed a memory book my mother had completed and read letters she’d written me during the years I was raising young children, marveling at how her words and wise advice could still inspire me, years after her death. I flipped through scrapbooks filled with clippings about her art and photos of various woodcarvings and paintings she’d completed. I studied the ledger she’d kept for twenty years detailing sales of her art work, noting how some earlier pieces brought in just a few dollars.
Nothing had stopped her from creating, I realized. Nothing. Not raising ten children, poverty, not even the death of my father some thirty years before. I saw it clearly; her faith-filled, creative life had been her greatest masterpiece.
I knew then what I would work on next; a book on creativity that would include the very words she’d written as epigraphs before each chapter. For the next year, I immersed myself in the topic, the enigma that was my mother a backdrop as I researched and wrote. I cried when I included a poem inspired by my grandson in the chapter on expressive writing and was delighted when my father unexpectedly appeared in another. I tested ideas and activities on the creativity group I’d formed at the library where I worked. By the time I’d turned in the completed manuscript, I’d been hired for a position that all my previous jobs, workshops, and life experiences had prepared me for; program coordinator for a spirituality center. Now, I plan, schedule, and implement presentations related to spiritual growth and creativity. I continue to write and teach workshops and writing classes.
I have never felt so alive, nor so certain that I am, indeed, fulfilling my mother’s wish in following talents she and my husband saw in me long before I saw them in myself.
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Mary Potter Kenyon Artist Statement:
Mary Potter Kenyon graduated from the University of Northern Iowa. She is Program Coordinator for the Shalom Spirituality Center in Dubuque, Iowa, and is a certified grief counselor. Mary is widely published in magazines, newspapers, and anthologies, and the author of seven books, including “Called to Be Creative.” (Familius, 2020)
