I almost didn’t become a writer because of an embarrassing faux pas.

But eventually my biggest weakness became my greatest muse.

In grade three I won a weekly prize in a CBC Radio poetry contest for my ode to a class science project on mealworms. Titled Where Oh Where Did the Mealworms Go? the poem was inspired by the mystery of returning to school on a Monday and finding the aquarium housing the tiny worms mysteriously empty.

With accolades from Canada’s national radio broadcaster, you’d think the prize would’ve propelled me to pursue the writing craft. But I didn’t even know that writing was something one could do as a job. And I had other dreams — to be an actress like Elizabeth Taylor or Lindsay Wagner.

Dreams die hard, so in my first year of community college I registered for a creative writing class. I was creative (or so I thought), having won the lead role in the high school musical. But I was a naïve 18-year-old about as worldly as an orphan raised by a flock of convent nuns.

I struggled with my first assignment. I didn’t know what to write, so that’s what I wrote. (I Don’t Know What to Write, blah blah blah, by Joan.) We had to read our compositions aloud to the entire class. Mine (obviously) didn’t go over well, so for my second assignment I had to step it up.

I wrote about the daily happenings in my neighbourhood. In particular, about a resident in an adjacent apartment high-rise who’d play their organ (the church kind) all day. This organist would not be called to play at Sunday service anytime soon because — as I read it to the class — he was trying to use two hands on his organ.

It sounded as if a pod of whales guffawed. Suddenly I was awake in a nightmare taking place in a horror house of mirrors as my classmates’ distorted faces roared with cruel laughter as their tears streamed and bellies ached. After they all picked themselves up off the floor, the teacher chimed in essentially telling me I had no hope as a writer.

Humiliated and confused, I never returned to the class. Didn’t even withdraw, just got a big fat failing grade. The worst — or funniest — part? I didn’t understand why everyone was laughing. It would be years before I realized the sexual innuendo of my prose. In my case it was unintended. It wasn’t my first time making a gaffe such as this. As a kid around ten I used to tag along with my mother to garage sales. Gazing at some homemade pottery at one such sale, I was struck by a bottle with a strange looking appendage (like a handle I thought) and decided to buy it with my allowance. The artist was trying not to giggle as she shared the story of how a piece of the bottle’s rim had chipped off in the kiln, so decided to make lemonade out of lemons (lude out of banal would be a more apt description). It was only when my friend Mary Jane saw it on my bedroom shelf did I learn what the appendage represented. She was obviously more worldly than me despite us both going to the same repressive Catholic grade school. She’d probably seen one or two in her life, at least in pictures. Me? I was like a dying little plant barely watered and never pruned. I’d never seen one, so how the hell would I have known? At least Mary Jane didn’t make fun of me. After the creative writing class debacle, I never intended to write again. But 11 years later during a two-year backpacking trip around Europe, Southeast Asia and Australia, I fervently wrote letters home. All handwritten, (It was the early nineties, before email and Internet) my family and friends kept them. When I returned home they told me how much they had looked forward to reading about my adventures. Odd I thought, as my family had never even kept my artwork from grade school.

It was when I was writing — not to write, but rather to tell my overbearing mother and concerned siblings I was alive, via my stories of being chased by Orangutans in the Sumatran rainforest and learning how to scuba dive on the Great Barrier Reef, that I discovered I could in fact write.

In 2010, I got a job as a copywriter for a large company, but my unintended sexual innuendos still popped up from time to time. It got so frequent at one point a colleague, who’d regularly review my work, came up with a code phrase for commenting if she read something of mine that was potentially suspect.

I learned how to celebrate my quirk and became somewhat famous (or infamous) for my unbridled creativity. Most of the time, my gaffes wouldn’t pass review, but they did inspire others to let go of the corporate stodginess the company’s writing sometimes fell into the trap of. But a few of my gems did make it to press! Like:

· Fill me up and turn me on (a sign on a dishwasher encouraging people to only wash full loads to save water)

· Fill the cracks and caulk the gaps (a headline for an educational brochure about how to weatherize a home)

· We did it in the basement and then we did it in the attic (A campaign to promote rebates on retrofitting a home’s insulation, but before we could execute the ads a dishwasher soap company used the same idea in a TV commercial, e.g. “We do it right after dinner!”)

· It’s so hot and hard! (I confess, this wasn’t copy, rather it was me bellowing — did I mention I’d performed in musical theatre? — in an office cubicle farm about my painful, red, swollen knee caused by a bug bite. As soon as the words dropped out of my mouth I realized my blunder. Typical Joan, I’m sure my co-workers thought.)

The moral of my little ditty is if you want to write, write — unabashedly, vulnerably and unapologetically. Heck, this is probably the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever written, but now I’m too old to care what anyone thinks. Who or what almost stopped you from writing?