Why I Write

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It’s 4:58 am on Friday morning. I’m sitting in my writing studio, a three-season porch that, given it’s -17ºF outside, requires me to wear wool socks and a thick bathrobe as I type this piece. The porch I‘m working in wasn’t designed for writing in the dead of winter. But here I am, just like I am virtually every morning, trying to craft truth from memories, thoughts, inklings, and visions that dance inside my sixty year old head. It’s a curious thing, this compulsion, this obsession to write. Folks I meet at libraries, or bookstores, or at writers’ conferences often ask “why”, “Why, Judge Munger, do you write?” That’s a good question. I’ll try to answer it.

I was born an incurable romantic. As a small child, I loved creating imaginary scenes of drama and daring-ado. I once built a blanket fort in Grandma Munger’s parlor. Inside my makeshift tent, I was a wounded soldier of the Great War being cared for by a beautiful nurse. So the first building block of my writerly obsession is simply this: I have a vivid imagination.

As a child, my mother read to me every night. Experts say that, to be a writer, you must be a reader. My mother’s love of books was gifted to me. I became a voracious reader, and, in due course, a writer. By first grade, I was hard at it. Somewhere in one of my scrapbooks my first attempt at writing, “The Piretas and the Two Man” (sic), an illustrated thriller involving cannibals and ships and pirates, is preserved. My spelling hasn’t improved. I keep an unabridged dictionary close at hand whenever I write. Spellcheck is a poor substitute for Webster’s when you are as phonetically challenged as I am.

At age ten, I discovered my Grandma Marie’s notebooks. Her journals were filled with her handwritten verse. I took to crafting poetry by scrawling couplets on the empty pages of those journals. The fact that my long-dead grandmother preserved her emotions by writing poetry, and was able to live on through her words after she died, made an impression on me.

Teachers encouraged me. Miss Infelise, my 8th grade English teacher, challenged me to “write over summer vacation”. I did more than merely write a sentence or two. I still have the picture book, “Emery Whipple Goes to Sea”, that was my response to a teacher’s challenge. I recently read that story to my great nephew Ryan. He liked “Emery” but, like many adult fans, thought the book a bit long.

High school found me working as an editor on the Denfeld Criterion under the watchful eye of Miss Goldie Cohen. Miss Cohen taught me to be succinct. Despite an occasional dustup with Miss Cohen over an article that was too racy or too personal or too heaped in controversy for a high school newspaper, Goldie encouraged me to keep at it, to write what I thought was true.

Most of you know that my vocation in life has been as lawyer and judge. There was a period of time where, because of school and starting a family and beginning my career, I didn’t write. But my wife René knew that, deep down, I’d always wanted to try my hand at fiction. When I faced a lengthy leave from work due to back surgery, René suggested that I begin working on a novel. René’s encouragement caused the writer in me to reemerge. My insatiable need to tell a story, a story, as Hemingway once said, that is true, burst to the surface when I began writing the The Legacy, a historical novel and thriller that received positive reviews and became a regional bestseller. Over the decades since my wife’s fortuitous suggestion, my desire to tell stories has urged my fingers to the keyboard of nearly every morning of nearly every intervening day.

Nine books later, I know this: as a writer, I simply must write. I cannot not write. I am, at my core, a teller of stories and those stories, regardless of fame, or readership, or monetary reward, must be shared.

An edited version of this essay first appeared in the Duluth News Tribune.

 

About Mark

I'm a reformed lawyer and author.
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