Only once in my life have I been punched in the face. So far. And that was a direct result of my writing.

I should backtrack to say I grew up in the Sixties on Long Island, in a neighborhood that was middle class and homogeneous. There were a lot of war veterans on my street and one of my favorite memories is of my neighbor, who had been a parachutist.  On weekend afternoons, after he had a bit to drink, he liked to hitch up his son to a parachute and that to the back of his car and then he’d take off down our road. I can still see my neighbor’s son floating over Cynthia Drive, his father red-faced and gunning the engine.

However, my mother was concerned that my upbringing was too sheltered. Why she wasn’t concerned about my brother I don’t know, but she decided to send me to a camp for children from the inner city. It would be a learning experience. (I’m reminded of Woody Allen’s great line about how he was sent to an interfaith camp where he was beaten up by children of all races and creeds.)

I’m small now, but when I was young I was like a whisper. I had pale white skin and was always either bruised or eaten up by mosquitoes. I was not a threat. However, I did have a journal that I wrote in faithfully. Every night I wrote down my thoughts and put the journal under my pillow. Of course it took all of 23 minutes for my fellow cabin mates to figure this out, and so every day after I trooped off to breakfast, they read my journal out loud and laughed. Unfortunately, I only found this out later.

There was a girl in our bunk who was an Amazon. Huge, powerful, strong, and I wrote down in my journal, meaning it as a compliment, that she could have been the leader of the Black Panthers. She didn’t take that well. I, oblivious, walked into my cabin one afternoon. She held up my journal, read it out loud, lifted me up by my neck and punched me in the face. She got into trouble. I spent the rest of the week with a bandage over my nose and the next summer my mother sent me to a camp where we put on musicals.

But I still remember the horror of the moment when I realized she was holding my journal. That was actually worse than the physical pain. It was the feeling of exposure. People who didn’t know me were reading my words and criticizing them. It’s something I think about at the start of a new semester. I understand when I see how nervous my students are about having strangers read their work and I sympathize. We all just want some mercy.

How about you? Have you ever gotten into trouble with your writing?