I’ve Always Been A Writer

I’ve Always Been A Writer

By Barbara Floersch

My grandfather, George Dewit Watson, was a writer. He supported his family selling shoes and shirts in a general store in a small, rural town in North Florida, but his true avocation was poetry. His poems, a regular part of his family life, now reside on brittle yellowed paper sealed in a manila envelope in my file cabinet. As a child, when I protested bedtime, he simply whispered one of my favorites: Let’s go to bed said sleepy head. Let’s wait a while said Slow. Let’s put the kettle on said Greedy-gut and have a bite to eat before we go.

My mother dreamed of being a journalist but married into a rural southern family with unbending ideas about a woman’s place. Raising children and keeping the household upright left little room for herself, but still she collected poems and stories. I keep those in the same envelop that holds her father’s poems. I can see her now, clipping favorites from magazines and newspapers, stashing them in an envelope beneath her lingerie, then rushing back into the fray.

My poet-on-the-side grandfather and journalist wanna-be mother were never published writers, but they had a deep, abiding love of words. For Grandaddy, writing was a way to capture, preserve, and share feelings. For mother, reading and writing were ways to be free. Somehow, they both managed a life-of-the mind beyond the rigid expectations of that small rural town. And that expanded life-of-the-mind is the enduring gift they gave me. 

You don’t have to be published to be a writer, you just have to write. I’ve been a writer for as long as I can recall. I began in middle school and once I started writing I never stopped. Essays and poems are my home territory, while persuasive and how-to writing have been my profession. I’ve only dabbled in short stories.

Early in my career I had a job orchestrating meeting logistics for a statewide council. Before long I was writing for magazines on topics such as planning out-of-town business meetings, managing meeting logistics effectively, and so forth. 

Later, on a whim, I sent an evocative essay to a magazine and when it was published as the lead piece, I thought it would change my life. Once I stepped down from cloud nine, my life felt pretty much the same, but I kept writing essays and articles that were published so, in a way, I guess things were changing. 

My writing later placed me in the lead position of developing grant proposals for a social service agency and I spent many years there doing hard, good work, building important supports for young people. Even then, writing-on-the side didn’t stop. By the 1990s, I was writing for The Grantsmanship Center News; by 2012, I was writing regularly for The NonProfit Times; in 2015, I authored the updated and expanded edition of Norton Kiritz’s seminal work in the field of grant development; and, now in 2021, I’m publishing my own hybrid how-to/why-to book of essays explaining the mindset you need if you want your grant development work to produce meaningful, lasting impact. 

I once met a young woman who paints in oil. She paints and paints, and when she said to me, “I want to be a painter,” I replied, “My dear, you are a painter. Do you not paint? Your paintings may sell, and they may not. That does not determine whether or not you are a painter.”

I’ll wager that, like me, many of you have always been writers. I write essays for newspapers and blogs. I write books. I write and write. I am a writer. In my experience, the seed of writing is planted deep and is indomitable.

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Barbara Floersch has over 40 years’ experience in the grants and nonprofit field. She has secured tens of millions of dollars in federal, state, and foundation grants and is the author of Grantsmanship: Program Planning & Proposal Writing, the updated, expanded edition of Norton Kiritz’s seminal work. Barbara was born in Quincy, Florida, and has lived in Vermont since 1976. Visit her website barbarafloersch.com.

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