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Mark David Gerson
a book bubble about
Acts of Surrender
Biographies & Memoirs
Author Insight
The Writer I Am (But Never Wanted to Be)!
I like to joke that my Muse tricked me into writing and, in a sense, that’s true. In public school and through most of university, I did everything I could to avoid writing, opting instead for subjects like math. That way I minimized the dangers of not only being wrong but of being judged harshly for having been wrong. But my Muse had other plans, as I write about in this excerpt. Starting in high school when I was pushed into doing the publicity for two theater productions, I was slowly, subtly and unconsciously transformed into the writer I never thought I wanted to be, and within a decade I was freelancing full-time as a self-taught writer/editor. Still, it would take another decade before I moved from a teller of others’ stories as a newspaper, magazine, government and corporate writer to a teller of my own — as author of my first novel, The MoonQuest. What I have discovered over the years is that the call to write is one I can’t ignore. I can’t not write any more than I can’t not breathe. As painful as were the decades of creative drought that preceded The MoonQuest, it’s those years that ultimately fueled all the passion that has followed: my teaching, my speaking and, of course, my writing.
Book Excerpt
Acts of Surrender
Given how passionate I am about writing, you might think that I always wanted to be a writer. Nothing could be further from the truth. Thanks to my mother, I grew up loving to read, and books were always an important part of my life. But I hated writing. English was among my least favorite subjects in school (only gym class was worse) and, through my first thirty years, I did everything possible to avoid creative pursuits.
Whatever happened in my early childhood to so turn me against self-expression is long forgotten. Looking back, though, I can see that I was destined to be a writer. I can see, too, that my Muse began her cunning, undercover campaign decades before I succumbed to what some have called the “incurable disease of writing.” Was my fate already sealed in Grade 1 when my composition “The Monster Snowplow” won such kudos from my teacher that the gold-starred foolscap half-sheet bearing my childish scrawl remained pinned to my playroom wall for months? Or was that just a teaser for a more potent symbol? I doubt that my fourteen-year-old self linked the Hermes nameplate on his first typewriter to the eponymous winged-heeled messenger god. Now, however, it’s easy to see the hand of my Muse in that. I even see her hand in whatever it was that crippled my creativity. Without the journey from total shutdown to unconditional surrender, there could have been no MoonQuest and no Voice of the Muse, and one of the overarching themes of my work would never have been.
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