Introduction: Alison Acheson
Dropping out and hurtling.
If there’s one phrase in our collective vocabulary that I dislike, it is the one we use for those who have decided to leave high school, and go explore life: dropout. It is a misnomer at the very least.
I was taking correspondence at the time — homeschooling, which might have saved me from “dropout” status — didn’t really exist as it does now. (I live in British Columbia, the place to be for learning at home; it is inscribed into our Education Act. I digress.)
By the end of June in grade 9, I was done. I’d already tried high school, and left the year before, and after months of learning on paper, I was rattlingly bored and wanted to move on with adult life. Already, I was a year older than my peers, as I did not start school until age seven. I enjoyed that summer, and then registered for hairdressing school.
Hairdressing school was a time-punched one thousand hours. In that six months, I met the most diverse group of human beings I have ever met, from Portugal, Fiji, Uganda, Jamaica, Czechoslovakia (still behind the Iron Curtain, and escaped)… The sexuality and gender spectrum, for me, was another world. Altogether, daily lessons in humanity stretched me more than any classroom ever could. Seeing the newly immigrated Jamaican woman totter out into the parking lot on her heels to put her face to the sky to experience her first snow…having deep conversation with the French-Canadian from a family of ten, wanting children, and wrestling with being gay…seeing a punk class-mate dissolve, sobbing, the day John Lennon was shot. She could not go on with that day.
It was a rich and human education. I never did go back to high school. I had my own small salon by age 22, and at 25, I decided to go to college. I did a mature student essay exam, and was admitted. I worked part-time and learned part-time. From age eight, I’d wanted to write, and even though the odds on being a writer seemed insurmountable, I followed my gut through what I hoped would be my path: a night-school course, in which everyone was so much older than I; books I chose carefully; professors I listened to. I never missed a class. I ended up with a history degree, then an MFA. Somewhere in that time I had a son, and underneath that graduation gown, there was number two son. I began to write children’s stories, and several months after the birth of my middle son, my first middle-grade historical novel — I did use the degree! — was published.
Several years after my MFA was complete, I was invited to return to teach in the program, where I have taught off and on since, comprehensive classes and workshops in writing for children and young people.
The advice about finding, narrowing, one’s writing areas… I don’t know how I can do that. My published works are a couple picturebooks, short fiction for adults, middle-grade and young adult novels, a ghost-written Boxcar Children (set in Canada), a book for an educational publisher on mental health and, most recently, a memoir of my time caregiving my spouse of thirty years through a rapid form of ALS. I write about writing, caregiving, grief, faith, music, healing, joy, mothering sons…and more.
What a list. “Dropout” is somewhere in my mix. It will always be a part of me. When I meet or hear about a young person who wants nothing more than to get on with it, I wish them the best. Life is big and wonderful, and most of learning does not happen in a desk. What happens in a desk is a side-dish — a relish maybe. Adds some distinctive flavor, some sharpness or sweet.
But what I chose to do after grade nine? That was all about hurtling myself into Life.
I am looking forward to working with Illumination, and connecting through writing.
And you might enjoy my piece about music.
