Every month I write texts for a few different companies. I send them out, they send feedback that requires rewrites – e.g. about level too-high/low, too long, too short, vague wording.
I read these emails and feedback, send a string of violent curses into my ceiling, bemoan my terrible writing skills, cry a little, and then, when I come back down to the form and blood pressure of a human adult, I realize that the feedback is fully warranted and I set out rewriting. Then I have a drink, the size of which would include the word ‘Blaster’ or ‘Gulp’ had I bought it at a 7-11.
But a few months ago, I received an email regarding feedback that hit different. As I scanned the email, I caught words that confused me. Unacceptable. Unsuitable content. Need to be changed.
This was new. Yikes.
The materials are for late teen kids and I went into a panic that somehow an alter-ego form of me had taken over and sent in a text about the Kama Sutra or a bio and technique guide of the Marquis de Sade. I slumped back into a gathering pool of flop sweat and foresaw my name in emails to HR and then ending up on the internet. Dear God. This is where it starts. Before that, I looked back at the email: . . . about war . . . about death . . .
My Dog, what had I done? With adrenalin-shaky fingers, I opened the accursed files.
Poe. As in, Edgar Allen. I had written a bio of him and a paragraph dealt with his suspicious death. Another text was about the Emu War of Australia. This was a good old romp in the 1930s when the Aussies brought in the army to kill emus who were damaging farmland and fences. They were 100% unsuccessful. Try though they did to kill the emus, since the emus were so fast and had a preternatural tactical talent for avoidance, the army trucks zigzagged, crashed into each other, and looked like the Keystone cops wearing gillies. It was a humiliating experience for them globally. Humor, I thought. War, they said.
Now, to be fair, I hold nobody negatively responsible here. The students reading these texts are coming from places where they may well have had to deal with war and death and why should they have to read about it in test materials? Short answer: they shouldn’t. Also, there are 75,000 topics in the world, it should be easy to choose one that doesn’t have the word ‘war’ in it or that doesn’t feature a strange writer dying anonymously in a Baltimore hospital. It is. The fault was mine and mine alone.
I rewrote. And while I rewrote I kept at bay the implications of avoiding bad parts of history. The extraordinary power of words to verbally forget that something happened is happening right before our eyes and ears. The people in red hats are currently trying to convince the rest of us – and the future – that on January 6 2021 a little get together occurred among some eager fans of the former president who were doing a self-guided tour of the Capitol building. Everyone understands the danger of this.
Nevertheless, in my rewrite Edgar Allen Poe had a mysterious illness and Baltimore doctors just didn’t know what happened. I leave out the part when he dies. The emus eventually run off to grander pastures, where they frolic and enjoy themselves. I leave out the Gatling guns and the angry Aussies. I think we can all agree that leaving pissed off militias and dying in Baltimore makes everyone happier. Well, when I got no further feedback, it made me happy.
I have avoided similar issues in my writing since. That is, until I wrote this last week about the life of Davy Crockett. If you’re American, you have heard of the ‘king of the wild frontier’ and why not? His life is what a lot of kids of my generation loved – outdoors, survival, jackets with fringes, wearing a neato cap with a tail. Crockett was also supposed to be a fair, kind-hearted person who told a great tall tale and, in completely unrelated news, was able to catch a bullet with his teeth. What’s not to love?
What’s not to love is that sometimes I don’t think things all the way through. Say, for example, the end of Crockett’s life, which took place in a little mission in Texas known as the Alamo. The Alamo is hard to forget because it’s right there in the motto – Remember the Alamo. Well, I had forgotten the Alamo. So, as I adapted and rewrote this text, it dawned on me that probably at some point, I was going to have to address the end of Crockett’s life, which involve lots of both war and death.
Nevertheless, in my story of Davy Crockett, he spends his last years in Texas building local communities. There, he touches the lives of many, who mention him as a helpful sort who has a lot of respect from those around him. The good thing is, I guess, Davy Crockett’s end of life in my text was better than the end of his real life. In my rendition of the end of Crockett’s life, he’s spending his days sipping beer and lemonade on the porch of a ranch house. He wiles away the hours watching the emus run free and waiting with no concern for his buddy, Edgar, who is sure to be home any minute from the hospital after his unexplained fainting spell after which he was found on the streets of Baltimore. He’ll be back any minute, safe and sound.
