Never Too Old to Learn

I've enjoyed writing all my life. Most of my writing, though, has dealt with facts and, since college, technical explanations. In junior and senior high school my writing was expository; I produced reports on such topics as Dinosaurs, the Mayan Culture, and Rockets. For a few years after high school I had a summer job away from home and I wrote at least one letter home each week trying to share what I was feeling in addition to what I was doing, but those letters were still more factual than emotive. In engineering school there was little writing related to course work other than lab reports, which were highly stylized. I satisfied my desire to write by working for the college weekly newspaper writing news articles, moving on to the job of Copy Editor, and as Editor in Chief in my senior year writing the weekly editorials. My editorials were intended to be persuasive, but aimed at appealing to logic rather than emotion.

In my professional life, in addition to writing many many technical proposals, I was the author of reports with titles such as “The Hospital Computer Project Time-Sharing Executive System”, and articles like “ARPANET, the Defense Data Network, and Internet.” These documents were intended to be useful to people who needed to learn about the topics they covered, but there is no doubt in my mind that they were as dull as dishwater.

In 2014 I discovered a writing group organized by Lola Laubheim at The Fountains and asked if I might join. At the time I first heard about it, I understood that the focus of the group was writing memoirs, but by the time I joined the focus was on short descriptive essays. Descriptive writing can be defined as “a type of expository writing that uses the five senses to paint a picture for the reader, incorporating imagery and specific details, that engenders an emotional response.” At the first meetings of the group I attended, I listened to moving examples of descriptive writing by Lola and other members of the group including Mary Paul, Gene Fletcher, and Stephanie Louis. I was certainly impressed, but doubtful that I could ever write anything with such strong imagery and emotive power. However, with the support of the group, I think I'm learning how to do so. It has been exciting, and challenging, to write every other week on an assigned topic. Generally it takes me at least a week to figure out what I have to say on the topic. Also, its definitely scary to hang my emotions out in public for everyone to see. I continually fight with the inclination to retreat to dull facts. Nevertheless, I keep coming back because I am having fun. Perhaps it will prove to be true that I'm “Never Too Old to Learn.”

Written as an assignment for the writers' group at The Fountains in April 2015.  The assignment was to write on the topic "Never Too Old to Learn".