A Little Slice of My Writing Life

My Illumination introduction

That picture’s not me, cuz I wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing a bow, even that young, but that crazy-happy “I’m climbing a tree!” energy is me all over.

Even as a little tyke, I was the poet of trees and stars, and I’d get up in a tree and recite love poems, in rhyme, to that tree or the birds and squirrels in it. Then I’d lie on the grass in the warm dusk and sing rhymes to the stars.

My first publication was age 7 or 8. Mom submitted one of my poems to her church newsletter and they liked it.

As a teenager, I was a goth before that was ever a thing, writing moody death poetry with other consumptive-wannabe teenagers. (Which is why someone invented pale make-up, because we were all healthy, tan, rosy cheeked kids.)

I had lots and lots of friends as a young adult and all my adult life, and also had the good luck to travel a bit every couple of years. I wrote colorful, descriptive travelogue letters that everyone loved, and they all said, “you should write a book.”

My first-ever published story was in a feminist journal, and it was about an assault. I showed it to someone at work I trusted, because I was excited about it, and she thought it was so good that she shared it with the whole office. Because it was in a literary journal, they all thought it was fiction, and so they gave me their opinions on my writing, “this part didn’t work for me,” “I liked that phrase, that made it seem more realistic,” “why would you pick such a gloomy topic for a story,” and so on. At first I was mortified, but then an amazing thing happened — their critiques liberated me, because I realized that history became story when it was published, and lost the power to harm.

I started writing poetry seriously as an adult while I was helping my Mom care for my Dad during his last years, and during those years had 50 poems published by now-defunct poetry journals. The thrill of being accepted and published helped keep my spirits up during that tough time.

After Dad passed, there was a miserable several years where my life sucked so much that I didn’t have any good stories to tell, but I didn’t want to lose track of my dear friends, so, to stay in touch, I created little poetry postcards with a poem on one side and art on the other every week for almost a year.

Then I took care of Mom in her last days, and after she was gone everything got grey for a few years, but when I lifted out of grief, I realized I suddenly had almost three free decades ahead of me that I had been planning to spend taking care of Mom (who intended to live to be 100, bless her), and so I sat down and remembered what I wanted to be when I grew up — a writer! And I also wanted to travel a lot more.

So my magic plan is to be a Perpetual Traveler for the next decade or 15 years, until I get too creaky to sleep in hostel beds, and then choose the perfect place or three to buy a nice apartment or cottage, like maybe one in France and one in Thailand so I never have to be cold. So far, I’ve been overseas almost two years, and I love it! I’m going to spend the next 30 years writing: travel articles for magazines, blog posts, fundraising writing for nonprofit organizations, short stories, essays, novels and, returning to where it all began, poetry.