I inherited three things from my paternal grandmother: my middle name, an engagement ring, and the desire to be a writer. I didn’t know that Gram’s ambitions to be a writer matched mine until I was sixteen, when I read an essay she wrote titled “Why I Am What I Am.” In it, she writes, “I have a very decided ambition to become an authoress. I have always loved to write…I have a vivid imagination, which was probably kindled by the necessity of my finding something within myself to amuse myself, for I had very few friends my age.” As the youngest person in both my extended family and my neighborhood by nearly a decade, I knew what she meant.

Gram, it turns out, never was an author. At least, not in the traditional sense. But of course, she still was, as many women are. Her writing is tucked into old address books, crammed into the margins of grocery lists, littered over countless greeting cards and letters. For years, she wrote portions of my grandfather’s sermons, after he abruptly quit his job as a chemist to become a presbyterian minister. A Quaker herself, Gram sat in the front pew every Sunday, listening to her husband profess her written words. She was a writer every day of her life, but never what we might call an author.

I wrote my first ‘novel’ at age fourteen. It was about a girl who found the entrance to a magical world in the forest behind her house. Unsurprising, given my reading list that year: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Secrets of Droon, The Magic Treehouse. My mother—can you believe it—typed it out for me on an automatic typewriter as I dictated. This was just after Gram died. We’d been on vacation at a family lake cabin when we heard the news. I sat in an armchair for an hour watching my dad across the room. He didn’t say anything. He just stared at the lake and cried.

I don’t remember as much as I like to say I do about my grandmother. Gram died when I was thirteen. She’d seemed to me the textbook-definition of a grandmother. She baked forget-me-not cookies at Christmas in the shape of clouted clouds that congealed in pockets of sticky sugar between my back teeth. She knitted sweaters like some people chain smoke, and then donated all of them to children in far-off countries. She liked to play cards, even after she couldn’t see well, her fingers long and thin like spider’s legs when she shuffled.

When I was fourteen, I saw a picture of her when she was young, and I was struck how she didn’t look anything like the Gram I knew. She was in her early twenties then and though the photo was black and white I’m told she had fiery red hair. She stood with the man who would become my grandfather at a Halloween costume party. She was dressed in a skimpy black bathing suit and was, clearly, a knockout. He wore a baggy fisherman’s suit and held a rod in one hand and her in the other, as if she were a large trout he’d just caught. Together, they were the Body by Fisher, the most iconic car of that year.

For days after I found the picture, I stared into the fierce eyes of this woman I barely knew, as if this photograph alone might solve a mystery I hadn’t even known existed. It turns out there were plenty of enigmatic objects tucked into attics and basements and molding cardboard boxes, detritus from Gram’s life that gave me a clue to who she might have been before she was a grandmother. I fell in love with those musty corners, those skin-thin found pages, the spindly legs of her handwriting. They were my magical world beyond the wardrobe or underneath the stairs.

One story Gram does not talk about in her essay “Why I Am What I Am” is the time she spent being a baby doll. This was not the official name for it—the official name for it was an incubator baby. My grandmother was born in 1921 at between 1 and 2 pounds. Her father’s wedding ring, infamously, could slide all the way up to her shoulder. Babies that premature were considered dead, as good as stillborn. The only option her parents had was to donate her, more or less, to the German doctor Martin Couney.

At the 1896 World’s Fair, Couney shocked audiences by displaying premature babies from a Berlin hospital in newly invented incubators. Off the hit of this exhibition, Couney worked to save the lives of premature babies across the United States and make a buck or two. Couney’s incubator babies were situated on boardwalks between the penny peep-shows and the leopard cages. People paid to see the babies’ tiny, scrunched faces, their raisin-wrinkled skin, their bulbous heads, their fragile bodies. The infants themselves have the eerie appearance of being just like baby dolls, breakable but nevertheless inanimate reproductions of girls that one could easily place into some imaginary scene.

For the first year of her life, Gram traveled from Atlantic City to Coney Island as part of Couney’s incubator baby exhibit. Strange as it was, it saved her life. When she was strong enough to survive on her own, she rejoined her parents, a conservative Quaker couple who owned a hotel on Atlantic City Boardwalk (or, as Gram puts it, “a conservative couple who were in an unconservative business in an extremely unconservative city”).

She grew up in the two small rooms her family lived in at the back of the hotel, surrounded by people and yet often alone. Her father was always working, her mother distant. Her only play companions were her constantly rotating collection of nannies. She was told not to speak to hotel guests, to be neither seen nor heard. I like to imagine that during this period—which, her writings tell us, included both volatile attempts at rebellion and frequent bouts of illness—Gram began to write. Alone in the back of that hotel, encased as if in a safe, her bright red hair aglow, she put everything she couldn’t say aloud onto paper.

Even after years of reading Gram’s writing, I often find myself returning to the photographs from Gram’s incubator baby exhibits. When I do, I’m drawn to how the babies always have their mouths open. Crowds of fascinated and disgusted onlookers peer into glass windows where the babies, neatly packaged in pink and blue frills, stare back out at them with their mouths opened in silent cries. Looking at those children—as small as porcelain baby dolls stored in individual, air-tight worlds of glass—I can’t help but think of the miniature worlds we construct and preserve in our own imaginations, the stories we tell ourselves about our mothers, our sisters, our grandmothers, our selves. These imaginary worlds we invent to fill in the gaps about the people we think we know best but may never have known at all.

The truth of the matter is, I didn’t know my grandmother. The stories I told myself about her, the story I tell about her now, may not be what she actually experienced. But these bits of writing, these scraps of paper, scribbled on diner napkins and backs of envelopes, tucked away in un-seamed notebooks and date books, they are whispers through the glass. I am here, they say, I am real. I am, whatever else I may become to you, a writer of my own words.

In these scraps, Gram is not yet a photograph of something long past, or a carefully preserved and staged figure behind the glass of my imagination. She is still about to happen, always already happening. She is, as Gram puts it, “a sketch…for a play, upon which the curtain is about to arise.”

-Alice Martin

Alice Martin is a PhD student at Rutgers University where she teaches writing and conducts research on unpublished and scrap-based writing by ordinary women in nineteenth-century America. She’s worked in commercial book publishing at Writers House, Algonquin Books, and Folio Literary. Her own scraps of writing have appeared in the Carolina Quarterly, Appalachian Heritage, The Canopy Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and too many typewriters.