Thank You, Leonard Wolf

by Sheila Ballantyne

1959 1 wrote poetry in my youth. There was a moment in time, one moment only, when I thought of myself as a poet. It was in San Francisco, on Grant Avenue in North Beach in the late fifties, in the Co-Existence Bagel Shop. I’d been hanging out with friends on a Saturday night and had fallen into a marijuana moment with a red-haired guy with eyes like pinwheels at the next table. He spoke first: “I’m a poet.” I said, “I’m a poet too.” We scribbled happily together on the butcher paper between us. The cafe was dense with smoke. Everyone was smoking: mostly Gauloises. I hadn’t yet switched to Kents, but when I did, I knew I’d never go back to the Co-Existence. Kents were for the downtown girls, and I would be graduating next semester—to selling scarves in the Emporium basement. College was definitely over.

The following year yielded a new job: medical records. By the time I got married and had children, I knew my life was over with regard to art and literature. My last moment as a poet was when I stepped out of the Co-Existence Bagel Shop and had a heated altercation with a cop who’d been posted there just to apprehend people like me. He said, “Young lady, you’d better put your shoes on or I’ll have you arrested.” “I like my feet bare,” I said, and began walking up Grant Avenue with all the smokers, drifters, and jazz boys on their way to a gig up the block, my sandals swinging loosely from my fingers. “I said, ‘Put your shoes on or I’ll put you under arrest.”’ I believed in individual freedom then. This cop was out to grind poetry under his heel. By now, my friends were pulling me away from the action. It was a humiliating moment for all of us. I knew my life as a poet was over. And this was the defining moment.

1968 By now there were two babies tearing the place apart. The vodka came in handy. I had been in danger of becoming the thing I feared most. And this was it. I got a sitter quick and raced back through the years to North Beach. Grant Avenue was still there. But I was in for a shock. The Co-Existence Bagel Shop was gone gone gone. It’s a video store now. My red-haired boy was gone as well, and I wondered idly where he might be at this moment, but then I looked at my watch and remembered the sitter and that was the end, the end forever of the red-haired boy. On the bus, I had this thought: there are two of us now who are no longer poets. It was freeing, in a way.

1972 After the unpaid labor of nursery school, kindergarten, the car pool, Head Start, Follow Through, and Parents in the Classrooms, it was by now the seventies. Holy shit, I thought: I’ve been a not-poet and a not-writer for over a decade now! When does the fun begin? My neighbor up the street was a professor at San Francisco State. I called him up and said, “I think there’s still a faint trace of writer in me. I should probably go back to school.” That’s what everyone else seemed to be doing. Get in a program, get a life (although that particular phrase had not yet been invented). So my neighbor said: Go talk with Leonard Wolf (now known as The Father of Naomi Wolf—that’s time warp for you). O.K. So I hired my 20th babysitter—this one was Nadja—and raced over to San Francisco State to see what I had to do to be a writer. The babysitter was stoned when I returned, and both kids had contact highs, but I’m getting ahead of my tale. What a zoo. All these people milling about, and no one was in his or her office. It probably didn’t help that I’d lost all sense of fashion during the childbearing years, and was, in fact, wearing an actual babushka on my head at the very door of Leonard Wolf’s office. My neighbor friend was in the xerox room across the hall and he introduced me to Leonard Wolf. It was my lucky day. “Come on in,” said Leonard Wolf as he unlocked his office, and in that moment the pile of manuscripts on his desk reached critical mass and everything fell swiftly to the floor. “What can I do for you?” he asked, unperturbed. This is what I said, in a voice pale from lack of use: “I want to be a writer.” That was it. That was all.

I sat there in the sweater my son had recently thrown up on. I sat there before Leonard Wolf in my fucking babushka. And this is what he finally said: “You want to be a writer? Go home and write. Did the great writers of the past go to graduate school? Did Emily Dickenson need an MFA from San Francisco State?” I saw I was in the presence of a true maverick. A person not unlike myself. What a relief! He was giving me permission to do the thing I most wanted to do—without theories, without analysis. just as the writers of the past had done: trusting in memory, imagination, and desire. And the voices in their heads.

I went home and fed my family and picked up the toys. When all was quiet, I cleaned out the garage, put down a rug, got a lamp, and began to write. I wrote on an Olympia that my husband had given me before I knew I was a writer. I wrote hell out of that machine. It was a beauty. Every evening at eight, I’d read stories to the children. After nine, I kissed them goodnight and went into my garage and worked until the birds came up, or the sun, whichever got there first. I wrote my first novel, Norma Jean the Termite Queen, in five months flat. It was a labor of love and often, at 3 a.m., I would find myself doubled over laughing, I enjoyed writing that book so much. I still taught in the children’s kindergarten and 3rd grade classes. I offered them the same opportunity I’d given myself: to write their own poems and stories.

In the end, it all worked out. But it took more time than I thought it would. There was a war going on. Everyone I admired was getting shot to death. The kids grew. Some time around 1982, after the publication of my second novel, Imaginary Crimes, I began to think of myself as a writer. I could say that I began to forge an identity in those times: The Vietnam War, the new assumptions about women, about women writing, taking risks, writing as a profession. And it would be true. In retrospect, I know I had the writing in me all the time. Thank you, Leonard Wolf, wherever you are. You saved me from graduate school and altered the course of my life.

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Sheila Ballantyne (ZYZZYVA 46) lives in Berkeley. She is an associate professor of English at Mills College in Oakland. Her most recent book is Life on Earth (Simon & Schuster).