The magic of self-taught writers

"You're like a little wild thing that was never sent to school" ~Mary Oliver

One of my readers said sometimes she feels a little disadvantaged because she didn’t get to study writing in college. No MFA, BFA or writing degree behind her name or under her belt, no teacher who helped shape her thoughts into beautiful prose.

So I wrote back. Told her she’s like a little wild thing that was never sent to school.

I love that phrase. It’s from a short poem by Mary Oliver about her little dog and it’s lovely and really short, so I’ll share...

You’re like a little wild thing
that was never sent to school.
Sit, I say, and you jump up.
Come, I say, and you go galloping down the sand
to the nearest dead fish
with which you perfume your sweet neck.
It is summer.
How many summers does a little dog have?
Run, run, Percy.
This is our school.
—Mary Oliver

Percy wasn’t the only little wild thing who never went to school. Mary Oliver was, too. Oh, she tried. She enrolled in Ohio State but dropped out. Enrolled in Vassar, but dropped out there, too. And yet somehow, she won a Pulitzer for her writing.

You’d be surprised if you knew how many of our most beloved writers were little wild things who didn’t go to school. Not to learn to write, anyway.

I grew up with a book in my hands. Old books, mostly, which comes of being number five in a string of kids born three or four years apart. Mama’s bookshelf was filled with kids’ books before I even came along. Books like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Jungle Book, and Treasure Island and when I was lost in those stories, I didn’t know they were written by little wild things that never went to school.

When I was reading about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn I had no idea that Mark Twain had to go get a job when he was twelve because his papa died and he needed to work to earn food rations, be the little man in the family. Because a hundred years ago, child labor was accepted and a lot of kids had to go to work.

Walt Whitman was working at eleven. Charles Dickens was twelve when his daddy was sent to debtor’s prison and young Charles was court ordered to quit school and work in a boot-blacking factory to pay off his daddy’s debts and you can see the echoes of that experience in his writing. Herman Melville got a job on a ship at twelve and the adventures of a boy working on a ship at sea inspired him to write Moby Dick.

And girls? Omg, don’t even get me started. Girls are why I have another publication on Substack called History of Women, to tell all those stories, which I don’t do nearly as often as I’d like to but I peck away at it.

Girls often didn’t go to school at all and if they were lucky they had a tutor to teach them to read and write, or maybe their papa did. Like Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder who became wonderful storytellers despite that they were little wild things who didn’t go to school.

But even when kids mostly went to school, one thing that never changed is bills needing to be paid.

Which is why Maya Angelou dropped out in high school and worked a lot of crazy jobs like cook, waitress, singer, dancer, actress, and streetcar conductor before she published her first book at age forty one. And when the world saw her writing, more than fifty colleges gave her honorary degrees and she became a professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

John Steinbeck enrolled in Stanford after high school but dropped out. Worked as a caretaker and tour guide and picked sugar beets alongside of migrant workers. And he didn’t just win a Pulitzer for Grapes of Wrath, he won the Nobel Prize, too.

Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Bukowski, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison. Same story. Everyone of them started college and dropped out. Had to go get a job to pay the bills. Faulkner, too, and then he won two Pulitzers.

And here’s a thing that’s just never changed.

It’s hard to make a living writing. It’s hard today, and it’s always been hard.

When I was little and wanted to write more than anything in the whole world, mama said writers go hungry, get a real job and it always broke my heart because it felt like she didn’t believe in me but she wasn’t wrong, it is hard. So writers didn’t always lean straight into writing because it’s a hard way to make a living.

Harper Lee loved books and literature more than almost anything but after she finished high school she enrolled in law school to make her daddy happy because he just wanted his little girl to be a successful lawyer. And when she dropped out of law school, she said he was crushed. She got a job at a bookstore and as an airline reservation attendant and wrote in her spare time—and the rest is history.

But that sort of thing happened a lot. David Baldacci was a lawyer. Lee Child was a television producer, and James Patterson worked in advertising, writing ad copy because those words paid. T.S. Eliot was a banker. John Grisham worked, plumbing, and construction before going into law.

Agatha Christie was a nurse and apothecary assistant. Khaled Hosseini, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Conan Doyle and Michael Crichton were all physicians. Later, Crichton said his medical knowledge really helped him write Jurassic Park.

Tara Westover was born to Mormon survivalist parents. Her parents were suspicious of doctors, schools, hospitals and the government. So she was never taken to a doctor or nurse. She said they were loosely home-schooled by her mama but it was her big brother that taught her to read.

But she was bright and when she got older, she applied to Brigham Young University and got in, even though she had no high school diploma. Earned a scholarship, too. She didn’t study writing. She studied intellectual history.

Her first book, Educated went bestseller. Hit #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list.

She says education and school aren’t the same.

Here’s exactly what she said. Because I love it so much.

You can teach yourself anything, better than someone else can teach it to you… I think sometimes our ideas about education have become very institutionalized… and we have started to forget that an education isn’t the same thing as a school.

She is so right. It’s okay to be a little wild thing that was never sent to school.

It’s not just okay. It’s more common than you might realize.

Wikipedia has a list of autodidacts in the creative arts, filled with writers, playwrights, musicians, artists and every type of creative there is, all of them self-taught, and the list is wildly long and at the same time, wildly incomplete.

Run, run, Percy. This is our school…

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