Book recalls epiphanies of teen girls Lively writing makes ‘Nerves Out Loud’ shine

NERVES OUT LOUD: CRITICAL MOMENTS IN THE LIVES OF SEVEN TEEN GIRLS, edited by Susan Musgrave, Annick Press, Toronto, New York, Vancouver, 112 pages, $9.95.

Once the angst passes and teen-agers morph into adults, some of them can look back at their lives and see the pivotal moment when things changed for them – when they knew exactly who they were and what they wanted be. Susan Musgrave asked seven Canadian women writers to describe their pivotal moments in “Nerves Out Loud.”

Musgrave, 50, a poet, novelist, children’s writer, essayist and columnist, lives on Vancouver Island in Canada but was born in California. Since 1991 she’s worked online with more than 1,000 Canadian high school students through the Writers in Electronic Residence Programme. “Nerves Out Loud” is a sort of sequel to “Where Did I Go,” also a collection of pivotal teen moments, published several years ago.

“I don’t think there is one moment when you realize, this is it, this is who I am, what has just happened to me is going to change my life forever,” Musgrave writes in the volume’s final essay, “Going Crazy, Wanna Come?” “Instead there are a series of life-altering moments, beginning when you are born and ending when you die, and a great many of these seem to occur in your teen-age years.”

For Marnie Woodrow, author of “Will You Kiss Me?” that moment was when she realized she wanted to kiss her best friend, Andrea. In “The Skinny One,” Karen Rivers found it when she noticed how many other girls “… bear the twin marks of bulimia, an open cut on the base of our gagging finger from where it bangs against our teeth… .”

The title essay, by M.K. Quednau, was written as a letter to her former high school English teacher. The writer described how her discovery came unexpectedly when she told a math teacher that she wanted to be a teacher when she grew up.

“I think I’ll be a teacher,’ I said impulsively,” Quednau wrote. “He had that look of fractions in his eyes, that look of oranges and apples and how many sections make a whole. I could smell another detention in the air … .”

He made her write it a hundred times before she offhandedly added the brilliant afterthought, “Or maybe a writer. I think I might become a writer.” Maybe it was writing that idea 99 times on paper that sealed the author’s fate.

All of the essays in “Nerves Out Loud” are about the troubles and traumas teen-age girls face. In “After the Flood,” Melanie Little describes how giving up figure skating led to too much time on her hands and too much drinking. Carellin Brooks heroically tells the terrifying story of how she was sexually pursued by her foster father in “Fourteen Turns.”

“Once in a while I see a man in the supermarket or on the street, whose behavior, as he bends to his girl-child, is far too ardent to be decent,” she wrote. “Instantly, I understand who he is, what he wants; my body stiffens at the sight … I see in the strange man the thrill of possession. I turn away, but what I want, more than anything, is to whisper in the girl-child’s small ear: Be careful. He will try and take you away from yourself… .”

The moving and powerful stories told in this book, however, are secondary to the writing. Musgrave seems to have pulled this slim volume together as a kind of text for her online students. These seven essays are not presented as cautionary tales about the dangers of drugs and alcohol or how-to stories on surviving bulimia, incest or divorce. “Nerves Out Loud” is about how to mine that experience as a writer.

Musgrave demonstrated this best of all. After quitting school at 14 and turning 16 during the Summer of Love in San Francisco, she wound up in a mental hospital. Her psychiatrist told Robin Skelton, a well-known Canadian poet and teacher at the University of Victoria, about “‘the young girl in the hospital writing poetry,’ and Robin came to visit me. Over tea in the cafeteria, Robin asked to see some of my writing, and I showed him my notebooks. He looked up at me after he finished my poem ‘Going Crazy, Wanna Come?'”

“‘You are not mad,’ he said. ‘You’re a poet.'”