Last week's Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop in Dayton, Ohio, celebrated 25 years of the conference. The University of Dayton held the first workshop in 2000 as a one-time event to commemorate the Bombeck family's gift of Erma's papers to her alma mater. It turns out once just wasn't enough, and now there's no hint of stopping it. The conference sells out quickly and is known to have a long waiting list.
I've wanted to attend the conference ever since I first began publishing essays and columns in the early 2000s. In 2012, I attended for the first time, and now I can't imagine not going. Throughout the years, I've volunteered to introduce presenters, and for the last three conferences I've been a presenter myself. It is a literal dream come true.
I didn't get to meet Erma before she passed in 1996. I was a kid when her columns appeared in more than 900 newspapers. But that doesn't diminish how much her work means to me now as a woman and human interest writer.
Erma showed up in my life right on time. My daughter had just been born, and I was figuring out what my life was going to look like. I desperately wanted to get this motherhood thing right. Erma's writing showed me there was no such thing. Her columns syndicated from 1965 to 1996, but I found her books in the library and her columns on the internet.
Her voice shrugged off perfectionism, and her stories of motherhood made me feel as if I had stolen a glimpse into the secret world I'd been longing to understand. My mom died in a car accident when I was 7 years old. All of her secrets and womanly advice disappeared with her.
Erma's columns showed me what womanhood in the 1970s and 1980s must have been like for my mom.
Erma served on President Carter's National Advisory Committee on Women. Jimmy Carter was the only Democrat my father ever voted for, which means my mom likely did too. Erma Bombeck joined Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem and Liz Carpenter for two years to champion the Equal Rights Amendment. The words that comprised the ERA, Erma said, "may be the most misunderstood words since 'one size fits all.'"
The ERA failed to meet the requisite number of state ratifications by Congress's deadline of June 30, 1982, so it was not adopted as a constitutional amendment.
While Bombeck traveled the country championing equal rights, my mother, with three biological children and three foster children, traversed our neighborhood, volunteering for the 1980 census. I'd like to think they shared a certain grit. Fortitude seemed part of their DNA, and both Erma and my mother used their talents to make a difference in their respective communities.
I, too, yearn to make a difference in my community, and like Erma, my medium is newspaper columns.
Erma's columns detailed the struggles of motherhood in her generation, and she did it with wit, substance and the sense that we are in this together. I could see my mother in these details, and I could also see myself. That was the magic. We laughed because we could relate. Erma's humor wasn't the biting sarcasm of today's social media. Erma's humor had heart. Her columns about loving her stepfather and losing a child late in pregnancy are gut-wrenching, poignant and brave. Most important, her words offered the belonging I so craved. We're in this world together, after all, and Erma Bombeck knew exactly what that meant.
The Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop has been dubbed the "Woodstock of Humor." For me, it feels more like a church tent revival where Erma's mantra is affirmed again and again: "You can write!" The camaraderie and genuine encouragement fuels my soul. I have made lifelong friends and met crucial mentors at this conference. As Erma's son Mathew Bombeck said at the conference in 2016, there is no better legacy for her than the Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop. It lifts the voices of hundreds of women every year, and no matter what is happening in the outside world, it reminds us all that we belong.
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