Motivation: guest blog by Jon Obermeyer

We write books because our children are not interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.

--Milan Kundera

I'm an author. My children, to my knowledge, are not writers. My mother is a composer of Christian hymns, but not an author of my books. My father was an accountant and, late in life, a driver of Enduro races and a volunteer park ranger.

Perhaps writing skips a generation. My grandfather Grey, a grocer, wrote Ogden Nash-style poems on special occasions like my birthday. Maybe my daughters will have children one day, and those offspring will pick up the pen.

I don't know where this thing came from.

Writing chose me, but there was never an official coronation, an onboarding, an orientation, or a launch event. There was no Road to Damascus or Belly of the Whale conversion. The author thing formed, like a sandbar from river sediment, over time.

I am home sick in 4th grade. I sneak an index card into my bedroom and write down a simple stanza, a pair of couplets about Christopher Columbus. I am proud of the rhyme scheme: knowing/showing, New World/unfurled.

We read John Updike's short story "A&P" on a warm autumn afternoon in Montecito. The windows in the classroom are open. The prevailing westerly breeze rustles the leaves in the eucalyptus. We can hear the tennis team practicing on nearby courts, the plock-pause-plock, plock-pause-plock of steady forehand returns, an echo of Updike's musical supermarket cash register. I want to write a story like that someday. 

A year later, I'm taking an early morning hike on a low peak above Edinburgh, Scotland. I'd been observing spectacular sunrises for 20 years along the Southern California coast. This sunrise is different. The city below me is 850 years old. I like the way Firth of Forth sounds. My parents have just divorced. I've been seeing four plays a day at the Festival and drinking Carlsberg Elephant lager, and I still have jet lag. The rain clouds remind me of a blanket. Something clicks.

I may not ever make more than $300 a year in Amazon royalties. I don't care about fame; it will be less than two minutes. Maybe the best I can hope for is to be able to read one poem at the monthly open mic night at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill.

There might never be accolades or agents. There might only be this perpetual impulse to populate a blank page with what interests me that day, what I can render elegantly by sundown. To quote Auden on the death of Yeats, on Yeats' gift for writing poetry: "It survives, a way of happening, a mouth."

Jon Obermeyer writes from North Carolina, where he writes poems, short stories, memoir. Mr. Obermeyer is working on a novel; no one will be surprised when he finishes it, though it could contain a surprise ending.