My dad was a car guy. Growing up, he didn’t have any doubts about where he wanted to end up in life career-wise, as far as I know anyway. He paid for the automotive classes he needed by bartending and by mopping floors at a local bodyshop, and by the time I was born, he was one of the top mechanics at a Chevy dealership, and in line to be managing his own bodyshop within a few years. And as his oldest daughter, I didn’t have dolls—instead, I had matchbox cars and transformers. At six years old, I knew that I wanted a green pick-up truck when I got older, and that I eventually wanted to be a good driver (like my dad) and know enough about cars to get by, if not more. Already, my favorite movie was Beverly Hills Cop; I still love that car chase that opens the movie, and a good car chase can sell me on just about any movie still, truth be told.
It’s an old cliche that cars represent personal freedom. And, at the heart of the battery in whatever vehicle we drive, maybe that’s true. Also true, though, is that those of us who are addicted to cars and to driving are also drawn into cars and open roads by our own separate storylines. In my case, that storyline is writing.
My first car was a little red Saturn with three doors, used and with about 14,000 miles on her, in the beginning; I named her Carrie Lynn within a week of finding her, and moved to Clemson, South Carolina to begin an MA in English within a month. From the beginning, driving Carrie Lynn became a part of my writing process, particularly when I was feeling blocked or uninspired. Driving on the highway never failed to leave me time to compose poetry. On long trips, I’d play with lines in my head, composing and revising until I was satisfied with a line, at which point I’d repeat it until I was sure I had it memorized or it led to a next one. Then, I’d be repeating those two lines…until they led to a next one. After reaching what I felt was my limit, repeating the lines like mad in my mind so that I wouldn’t lose them, I’d pull over to the side of the road, scribble them down, and then get back on the road. Eventually, my family would become accustomed to the fact that my travelling time would get thrown off by poems, or that my eating schedule on the road would be affected by where I was in my writing process. My grandmother remarking that I’d “made good time” often meant that I simply hadn’t gotten as much writing done while travelling, or composed a plotline and pieces of a story instead of a poem.
My car showed my process, too. Inside the car, pens and notepads were scattered between the seats and in the floorboards. I was meticulous about keeping Carrie Lynn free of actual trash, but clutter was something else. As I took more and more road trips to visit friends and go to conferences, the “process” expanded to my trunk. Before long, it never had less than two or three notepads with scribbled down poems that just needed one further revision, and my colleagues at a theater where I worked as a stagehand jokingly called it the library—it was full of books, and they could go out to my trunk for reading material if we had a particularly boring couple of days where we weren’t doing much more than babysitting performers.
With Carrie Lynn, I attended my first Open Mics, my first writing workshops, my first writing conferences, and wrote more poems than I could count. If I was struggling with a poem or a paper, nothing helped more than getting in my car and driving, often until I got lost and had to call friends with landmarks, hoping they’d know the area well enough to give me some pointers back home. On the open roads and highways around Clemson, I became a driver something like my Dad had been, according to my Mom: fast, smart, and loving every mile. And during those years in Clemson, where I really developed as a writer, and where I moved from attending readings and workshops to participating in events, and finally even planning them, I also learned how it felt to participate in finding my own fate—my freedom, I suppose.
Five years ago, I moved to Pittsburgh, and in the past few years I’ve had to admit that owning a car is now a luxury: I could get by without one, logistically. I’m not, however, so sure that my writing would get by. For me, driving isn’t so much a way of feeling my independence as of feeling my own way forward. When I get into Dameon (the love who eventually replaced Carrie Lynn), I feel in his engine a connection to my father, and to my writing. I feel the basic power of being able to make decisions and move forward through my own choice, and on the highway with the radio or a cd blaring, words make more sense than anywhere else.
And I write this because, more and more, I’m reminded that keeping Dameon—holding onto any vehicle—is a choice I make. It’s a choice I make to remain connected, in my own fashion, to both my past and my writing. Having committed to this path of writing that so many of us find ourselves on, part of that path means making time to remain inspired and connected, whatever that means.
So, yes, driving is my means of freedom, cliched or not. It is also my promise to myself, as a writer, to remember why we write, and to remain committed to that road.
Jennifer L. Collins lives and writes in Pittsburgh, and serves as a summer faculty member in Creative Writing and Drama at the Cardigan Mountain School in New Hampshire. Her poetry is forthcoming in The North Chicago Review, The Ottawa Arts Review, The Kudzu Review, and The New Plains Review; her work is currently featured online by In Parentheses, Collective Exile, and Ayris Magazine. Jennifer is also one of the authors involved in Middle Ground: An Archive (http://anobiumlit.com/services/middleground/) and occasionally blogs about imagination at http://www.whatimaginationlookslike.blogspot.com/ .
