Laura Westlund

A Reflection for Students

Rejection, Writing, and a Life with Language

You can’t always get what you want.

I learned that constant life lesson in high school when for four consecutive years I applied (or as we said then, “tried out”) to be on the staff of Images on the Wind, the Edina East literary arts magazine. But there was a rule in Edina in the late 1970s: you could not be in Band and on the staff of Images on the Wind. This made no sense to me. I was able to write poetry and play my clarinet at home without any incompatibility, but it was not possible to do both at school. So I graduated from Edina East in 1981 without ever wearing an Images staff T-shirt or helping produce the award-winning literary arts magazine.

But I wrote—at the kitchen table or at the little desk in my room, just as I had since second grade, inventing stories, making rhymes, imagining worlds. I did find opportunities to write at school, starting with Marc Reigel’s creative writing class in eighth grade. I soon discovered that the overwhelming terror of having to read what I wrote in front of the class was more than compensated by hearing other students read their writing. I was fascinated by what and how my peers expressed in iambic pentameter, a one-act play, or a ballad. Later in high school, my strongest experiences with language were not with my own writing but with literature, and not just about reading but also speaking. Memorization was emphasized in our curriculum, and we regularly had to recite passages of poetry by heart, beginning with the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in the first semester of English Lit. “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, the droghte of March hath perced to the roote . . .”: we each stood before our fellow adolescent literary scholars and proclaimed this early poem in Middle English, word for word. Over and over we practiced our lines—and we learned not only Chaucer but also the persistence and power of memorization, as many of us can still recite the Prologue today. We got this into our brain, and it stuck. We recited from Macbeth, strutting and fretting our few minutes upon the stage, and in American Lit we learned a valuable if somber directive from William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” to guide us in the years ahead: 

So live, that when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan, which moves

To that mysterious realm, where each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of death, . . . 

approach thy grave,

Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

Together we stretched our comfort zones, our cerebral muscles, and our confidence—and our empathy when our classmates paused and blanked in their performances.

My passion for writing and language continued after I left Edina. In college, my Expository Writing class introduced me to Joan Didion, worth the price of admission right there and a solid reason to become an English major. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” Didion wrote, and in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook” she stated: “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.” Yes, I thought. That’s why I like—and need—to write. 

I also continued to study Spanish after Señora Wilbright’s Spanish IV at Edina East, and as the decades passed I wove my favorite interests and talents into a successful career in publishing, editing, translating, and writing. I remain energized and enthusiastic about working with language, whether it’s editing an exhibition catalog for an art museum, translating a children’s book, writing jacket copy for a novel, figuring out how to transform a box of photographs into a beautiful art book, or creating the subtitles for a movie. I still write at the kitchen table and at my desk. Writing sustains me, keeps me challenged and engaged, records my experiences, creates souvenirs of my life in words. 

My resume does not include a line about working on Images on the Wind, but my writing was selected for publication in the magazine. My short fiction “Picasso Reborn” was accompanied by an illustration by R. J. Matson, who was in my homeroom and is now a well-known national political cartoonist. Everything turned out fine. Perhaps at our next reunion we will have a group recitation of “Whan that Aprille.”