Art, Craft, Career: In That Order

“People laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas, you have to use big words to express them, haven't you? There's such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person.”

                                                      Lucy Maud Montgomery

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It is no secret to those around me that I love words. Words like epiphany, crescendo, and tomfoolery. I love reading— and do not get me started on Scrabble. My middle son shares this passion for words. While he pursued a Linguistics degree and a Master’s in Speech-Language Pathology, I write. Its beginnings are rooted in Anne of Green Gables. Truly. 

From a young age, I would roll and savour new words on my tongue and in my mind. I would then jot them in a journal. I would decorate them, outline them, turn them into artistic poetry. The way other children scrawled pictures on desks or in the margins of their three-ring, colourful, thin notebooks, I scrawled words. My grade 5 teacher moved me into a gifted reading program wherein I had to read Shane instead of an easy choose-your-own-adventure, while my Grade 8 teacher, Mr. Durocher, admonished me for finishing the entire Language and Spelling 8 workbook by November. 

Writing was my art. Throughout my university years, I was enthralled with the craft of writing. At St. Francis Xavier University, I majored in English literature and minored in French literature and poetry—with eclectic concentrations in nutrition and psychology. Healthy body, healthy mind. I grew obsessed with syntax. Implement a variety of sentence structures, I tell my high school English students. I wrote poetry and short stories when I was in both high school and university. Though I continue to write short stories and poetry, I now write personal essays and novels. Artful writing is poetic. Structured writing is clear. Strong novels are both; so the next time someone asks if writing is an art, craft, or career, the answer is yes.