by Jack

UNPROMPTED

My grandma was a sweet woman, clever, funny, and absolutely addicted to reading. Seriously, if you live in the Chicagoland area and want some free books, as of writing, there’s gotta be a few thousand we haven’t been able to give away. From all that reading, and from being an English professor for many years (with many 5-star reviews on RateMyProfessor), she developed a writing style that was just like her.

A few years ago, in anticipation of the birth of my niece, my sister Elise started using some app that would send my grandma writing prompts to learn more about her life. Elise told me that, despite the prompts, “she basically wrote whatever she wanted to.” She’d sometimes loosely follow prompts she’d already seen, other times she’d completely ignore them, and she’d always title her essays to her own taste. I am working to edit those pieces – as well as essays and papers she wrote when she went back to college to get her bachelor’s (and masters) – into posts that can be shared more easily with family and friends. I want to brag about my grandma. 

In the first batch I’m working on, from those prompts, you can feel her gain confidence as she goes further and further along. You can feel when she’s in a flow. Or maybe she just agonized more over every word. She’s relatable, specific, direct, honest. She was not always clear in where her metaphors were going, and some sentences went long, as she remembered another thing she wanted to say. She had a gift for endings. There is something that makes me sad though: this is all we have. We have found no dusty manuscript for a novel, or hidden collection of short stories.

The desire to write well, when mixed with fear, can trigger paralysis. Even before her stroke, my grandma had stopped responding to Elise’s prompts. She was delving too deep, it seemed, into herself – and the desire to get everything just right taxed her. I wonder if that anxiety prevented her from writing more her whole life. There’s a persistent argument that suffering drives artists to make great things. I don’t think that the popular wisdom is true. David Lynch put it best:

“It’s good for the artist to understand conflict and stress. Those things can give you ideas. But I guarantee you, if you have enough stress, you won’t be able to create. And if you have enough conflict, it will just get in the way of your creativity. You can understand conflict, but you don’t have to live in it…the more the artist is suffering, the less creative he is going to be. It’s less likely that he is going to enjoy his work and less likely that he will be able to do really good work.”

I don’t mean to say my grandma had a bad life and that’s why she didn’t write more – far from it. She loved her “unforgettable” Don, her kids, her family, her house. Barbra Sue Yurachek was a wonderful grandma. I’m glad I got to find out she was a wonderful writer, too. I highly recommend reading her stories aloud. That’s what I did, anyways.