Who is CJ Queen?
I ask myself that question, and it always gives me pause. Can I say I’m not sure?
The world tells me that after over 40 years has passed, a person should know. I currently hold and have held many titles. Teacher. Mom. Grandma. Wife. Sister. Daughter. Friend, and that ever elusive title of “writer.” When can one call oneself a writer? I was a mom upon the birth of my first son — some would argue I was one even as I carried him in my belly. Those first titles were instantaneous. One moment I wasn’t and the next I was. But “writer” — that’s a fickle title or I just overthink.
I’ve been writing since I can remember, reading too. Books were like best friends to me as a child. I treasured the few I had. Years later I overcompensated for my lack of books as a child by buying enough books for my own kids to fill their own private library. But back to that writing thing. See, I think that’s the crux of the problem — publication. Are you a writer if you never publish? If you never share what you’ve written, are you a writer or a scrawler of glyphs?
I got my first taste of publication rejection in high school. I don’t even know what I wrote back then. I’m pretty sure I destroyed it; I was so disappointed. But someone, a teacher, that I looked up to had told me what I wrote wasn’t good enough. I was about fourteen then. But words didn’t stop floating around in my brain until they came out on paper. At sixteen, I tried my hand at songwriting. The result sounded very much like a country song The Judds might have sung. (Being perfectly honest, I think the music might have been from a song of theirs. To be fair, I was a writer of words, not little black dots.) So, yes, I kept on writing — mostly poems, sometimes short fiction.
In those formative years from high school to college, my life took a turn I was not expecting. I was a young mother. At eighteen, I had a newborn baby and started college, recently married, and eyes opened to a new side of life. I submitted poems to my college’s literary journal. Low and behold, some were published! I was even asked to read one of them, “Unfit,” at the ceremony. The next year, I got some more published, and when I transferred to the bigger state university, they even published some of my poems.
The next few years were a blur of work and parenting. I worked at an alternative school and had some unusual experiences. On my first day, a young man fresh from the youth detention center (YDC) explained to me how he could use toilet paper to kill me. That didn’t scare me off as it was intended to do. I stuck around and met some kids that I don’t think I will ever forget. Some of them still bring tears to my eyes. The girl who told me that her stepmother was abusing her. I reported the abuse to DFACS; they informed me that she made up stories. They had investigated before and found no evidence. They didn’t find that evidence until her little sister came to school one day with a bloody eye. But it was too late for my student. She had a meltdown in school and got sent to YDC. Or the young man who had finally completed everything he needed to graduate and had everything lined up to join the military. I heard his obituary one day driving to school. He had died in a car accident, celebrating with his friends. That’s just two; there are more.
Suddenly, life changed again, and I was a stay-at-home mom. I still wrote, but I wasn’t sharing what I wrote outside my family. My children inspired a lot of the poems I wrote then, and I am quite aware that some of them are what poetry snobs would call “trash.” Well, not “trash” exactly, they would have a much more elaborate phrase to describe them. Perhaps, “self-indulgent, forays into predictable and tacky rhyme schemes”? (I am my own worst critic.) My confidence took a hit. I began to write less as our family grew. Occasionally I would write something. I started three novels — yeah, started.
As my children got older and more independent, I began writing again. I wrote some poems for publication that I was quite proud of — and promptly got the “thank you, but” email. And, now here we are. Putting my writing out there. If you like it, you like it. If you don’t, you don’t. And either outcome is ok.
So…when I hit that “publish” button, am I a writer now? I guess only one way to see…