My Writing Journey — Part 1

In the immortal words of David Byrne, how did I get here?

The writing archive of James D. McCallister. Does not include personal journals, pre-collegiate work, or volumes of material stored electronically and likely never to be printed.

The path I’ve taken in becoming an author of novels, short stories, and screenplays (along with industrial scripts, narrative nonfiction articles, academic papers, advertising copy, and various business documents I’ve been tasked with composing) is certainly ongoing, but began the day as child that I picked up one of my mother’s books and discovered the joys of reading for pleasure.

As that young reader I felt transported by the tales I discovered and experienced, narratives woven by writers of comics and movies I loved, then authors like Ian Fleming and Stephen King (I turned to adult themes pretty early!), and SF/fantasy writers like Tolkein, Herbert, Niven, Pohl, and others. It was a particular volume of Edgar Allen Poe, however, that I consider my first true literary influence.

The original volume of literature that inspired me.

Poe—scary stuff told in vivid, rich, archaic language, his words from a time long in the past… sentences and passages and stories that in the very ability to connect with me portended a kind of immortality: over a hundred years after this writer’s death, his thoughts, still living and breathing on the printed page. Most of all, though, influencing a young man born on the other side of time from the author.

In a word? Magic.

Was it the process of reading, or the storytelling itself that first captured my imagination? Considering the mystical alchemy that is the act of reading—an author’s mind touching mine, from across the void, a kind of telepathy—I think it was some of both.

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As a prepubescent and adolescent I spent a good deal of time at loose ends, my afternoons passed wandering a pine barren a mile or two off the freeway in Lugoff, SC. I needed narratives beyond the surface reality of my life, and my family’s life. I needed imagination—my own, of course, but also that of others: writers, filmmakers.

Storytellers.

And while I had friends at school, the fact that I was a typically modern, suburban American kid with both parents working meant I spent much of my time at my grandparents’ house—every day after school, and every day all summer long. Sure, my grandmother was around, so I wasn’t all by myself, as the refrain of a popular song of the time went, but I lacked all my school friends, all of whom lived in other neighborhoods (like mine over on Truesdell Avenue). There didn’t seem to be too many kids on that street in Mayfield Acres—there were a few, I suppose, but I didn’t try to find them, and they didn’t try to find me.

Or, maybe I just kept to myself.

I was shy, and suffered terribly troublesome self confidence issues. I hated the sound of my own voice. I cringed at my chubby face in the mirror. I hated ever being the center of attention, which being the fattest kid in class meant that I got all the time, and in any number of unwelcome ways—in those days, most of the kids were skinny, and the less kind ones never let me forget it. Now, of course, almost every kid’s got a flabby, high-fructose corn syrup belly hanging down—and if they don’t yet, they will soon, unless everyone gets wise to this poisonous corporate food they’re shoving down our throats… but I digress. In any case, do the skinny ones get tortured instead, now? I hope not.

Mayfield Acres… it seemed like the countryside but not really: a laid-out neighborhood of modest ranch houses; a typical suburb. Maybe not our modern plastic, planned and landscaped ones, but a subdivision nonetheless, cut out of the woods near various industrial and warehouse installations that’d previously bought up what was probably once either farmland or woods. Lonely and rural. I needed stories.

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The intellectual atmosphere in which I dwelled at my grandmother’s was a limited one: my grandmother Aylene, a product of the Great Depression and of sending her husband off to fight World War II, was by any standard a fearful woman. She feared The Other, feared taking risks. For years after the war my grandfather, a PTSD sufferer back in the days before men like him were allowed to suffer, had awakened at night in screaming cold sweats. That alone would probably be enough to make anyone fearful.

I never knew what horrors he’d experienced, however. I asked, oh, you can believe I did, but was never told. I wonder to this day what happened to him, until I remind myself that being in warfare of any kind might produce such a reaction in a human being: warfare is one of the least natural activities we as a species so foolishly choose to pursue. In my first professional career, as a motion picture archivist, I worked with a collection of newsreel footage that included millions of feet of World War II material, including D-Day, in which my grandfather had participated. I would often watch the images of the men coming ashore and wonder if one was him. When he left us in 1997, the opportunity to know what he’d experienced was lost to me forever.

One day I expressed a desire that I wanted to grow up and go off to (be a writer/make a movie/etc), and my grandmother replied, “Well, darling! People like us don’t do that. You can get you a good job up at the plant. A job, and a house and a family.”

People like us?

Her generation didn’t have time for dreams of storytelling—they were on daily subsistence drill. They had to worry about where their next meal came from—she’d grown up poor on a farm in Texas. The depression was the way of things. A job at the textile mill, a good and necessary and blessed event. So, fear. Hers I didn’t understand then, but I do now.

In any case, I was made to feel unrealistic for dreaming my big dreams, but they wouldn’t let me go. It took me a long time to get over the notion that ‘people’ like ‘me’ didn’t pursue certain paths. I don’t blame my grandmother for instilling her fear in me. I did for a long time—I didn’t get where she was coming from, why she wouldn’t want her grandchild to go off and take on the world. Going off and taking on the world involved risk. You came back from the world with screaming nightmares. So, with all that in mind, there isn’t anything to forgive. She was the product of her life and times.

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Speaking of Lugoff, and growing up suburban: my hometown (or whatever an unincorporated community should be called) skirts the line between rural South Carolina and what we think of as a typical middle class bedroom community, in Lugoff’s case as bedroom to folks who work twenty-five miles down the road in the state capitol, Columbia. In the 70s when I was a boy (I was born in ’65, only four short months before the Grateful Dead), Lugoff had started to become that bedroom community full of subdivisions that so defined its modern identity, but at the time the DuPont complex (the ‘plant’ to which my grandmother referred) also attracted a class of suburbanites from other places, the middle and upper management types who came from exotic faraway places like Delaware.

And, like I said, my own folks were the progenitors of this class of bedroom community commuters, my father as an HVAC technician climbing the ladder to his own management position, and my mother on a similar track, as a what we used to call a secretary at a car dealership who would grow into the position of credit manager.

Latchkey kid alert.

But not until adolescence—from K through 8 I was left with those long wandering afternoons to fill, and all day during the summer, in which I had to carry the things I wished to have with me for amusement or entertainment: toys and games, later comic books, books, magazines. But always a limited amount—one cannot transport all one’s things back and forth across Lugoff every morning and evening. I had to fill in the details of my GI Joe or other action-figure adventures with the tools at hand, which sometimes meant I didn’t have all the accessories at my disposal. I had to make do.

I had to imagine.

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In the next chapter of my writer’s journey story, I’ll discuss where all this imagining would lead, first as an adolescent who began to believe in the possibility of becoming a writer, and a high school and college student seemingly on the direct path.