IN YOUR OWN WORDS

One Simple Phrase

While the journey that led L.J. Davis ’89 (M.Ed. ’91) down the writer’s path began early in life, it wasn’t until her senior year that she fully realized that she had all the tools she needed at her disposal.

When I was 4 years old, my mother gave me a typewriter to play with. The sturdy keys bounced back stiffly when I hit them, and I loved hearing the clack, clack sounds as I began to piece together sentences. At the age of 7, I wrote my first story, Princess Running Fawn and the Magic Rainbow. It was typed in red, since that was the only color left on the typewriter’s bedraggled ribbon. Of course I presented that story to my mother, and of course she tucked it away, as mothers do.

I’m one of the lucky ones: My mother always encouraged me to reach for the stars. She listened when I told her about the characters that jammed my head — flying horses, shape-shifting fathers, people who lived in the clouds. She stood by me when I announced I was going to go to college, even though no one on either side of my family had ever attempted it.

During my first few years at USD, I carried a full load of classes along with a full-time job. There was no time to write, which was just as well. The stories that had once glutted my mind were silent. Doubt crept in, and I wondered if I would ever actually craft the stories that my mind once imagined.

And then I took a pair of independent study courses with a frail-looking teacher named Joanne Dempsey. Dr. Dempsey was diminutive, the kind of woman often overlooked in our society. Though soft-spoken, she was incredibly articulate. She knew French, Latin and Spanish, traveled extensively, and loved Shakespeare. When she lectured, her whole being shook. She had a passion for literature that set my brain on fire.

I took two independent study classes with her my senior year, one devoted to Shakespeare and the other to Milton. I had no idea that Dr. Dempsey had extensively analyzed Milton’s Paradise Lost while studying for her doctorate at Harvard, but I figured it out quickly enough as we dissected passages and uncovered hidden themes. At her suggestion, I wrote in a journal, responding to specific questions that Dr. Dempsey posed about certain passages.

Instead of trying to humble me with her intellectual superiority, it almost seemed like Dr. Dempsey leapt into my mind and grabbed ideas, pulling out fragments of thought. She often said things like, “You see things in such a different way,” or “I never thought of that.” She made me feel that my opinion mattered.

The rain was beating hard against the windows in Dr. Dempsey’s office on the day she said the words that would haunt me for the next 15 years. I was reading a passage aloud from my journal about how I could actually hear Milton’s voice in his work. Dr. Dempsey was staring at me in a way she never had before. I was waiting for words of correction or redirection. Instead, she quietly said, “One day, Lisa, you will be a writer.” I was struck to my very soul. I’d never said a word to her about my lifelong dream. Yet still, somehow, she knew.

I suspect she had no idea that those words would affect the course of my life. It’s unlikely that she knew I recited them like a mantra while I worked customer service jobs to pay tuition for grad school. There’s no way she could have known that as I took on different careers, those words — “one day, you will be a writer” — were like a beacon pulsing in the distance. Her words infused me with a sense of confidence that I could be the person I knew I was. Those words sparked a fire in me that burns fiercely to this day.

Over the years, I have tried to pass on the legacy that Dr. Dempsey left for me on that rainy day. She taught me, as did my mother, that words spoken to an impressionable mind can invoke a sense of purpose that fulfills a destiny. We take it for granted that young people are too busy enjoying life to deal with what we think of as complex questions. Perhaps there is nothing simpler than to ask that fundamental question: Why am I here?

The complexity comes in answering it.

L.J. Davis’ first children’s book, A Simple Brown Leaf, is available through Amazon.com and in selected bookstores nationwide. USD alums are invited to contact the author at ljdavis@ljdavis.com to purchase signed first-edition copies. Fifteen percent of the proceeds from these sales will be donated to the alumni scholarship fund.