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Kristin Tracey (Class of 2010)

Kristin Tracey manages her writing disease

I remember the day, in first grade, when Dick and Jane infected me. The infection was not your average head cold -- stuffy nose, annoying cough. It was a disease. The disease manifested itself in an obsessive reading and writing habit. Recurring and relentless, the disease was both exhausting and exhilarating, but ultimately frustrating. Passion drove me to write; fear of going public crippled me. I wanted to be a writer, but instead I ended up feeling like a sufferer of some kind of chronic disease. Determined to find a way to manage my disease I enrolled in a professional writing program and spent the summer of 2009 interning at the literary magazine Event.

The writing program was where I received my traditional "patient education" in chronic-disease management. Professional writers, researchers, editors, and designers taught me how to harness my writing skills. I wrote. Instructors gave feedback. I learned. It was a collaborative approach to improving my writerly skills. More importantly it was a safe environment in which to vet my literary creations. And that was a problem. I still had something to learn about self-efficacy and self-worth -- which was vital if I wanted to go public and earn a living writing.

Medical studies say that most of the care patients need for managing chronic disease should come directly from the patients themselves. The goal is to have the patient move from a collaborative disease-management approach to a more autonomous approach. Interning at Event magazine helped me move in that direction. The self-directed work environment encouragement me to work independently and to trust and value my own judgment when it came to examining manuscripts.

My internship also introduced me to a new perspective on what it takes to be a published writer. An early aha moment came when I finally grasped that Event would not exist if not for all the writers submitting manuscripts. Writers were its lifeblood. In fact, writers were the lifeblood of all literary magazines, newspapers, publishers -- the list was endless. Writers and their manuscripts were desired, recruited, and in demand. Ergo, I, being a trained writer, was a sought-after commodity.

Reading dozens of manuscripts during the summer led me to another epiphany. I was awed by the faith that so many writers had that their words were worthy of reading. They had gone public with their manuscripts and survived. Maybe their stories would get published, maybe they wouldn't, but at least those writers were putting their words out in the world. I realized that there was no reason I couldn't do the same thing. I had the skills for writing, and I was as capable of submitting manuscripts. If they could endure going public, then so could I.

Interning at Event gave me the final tools I needed to effectively manage my writing disease. I stopped waiting to become the quintessential perfect writer. I acknowledged that I was already a writer and accepted that I didn't have to be fearless. I just had write and set my words free.

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Posted April 2010