about who I am
"What's this one mean, Lynne?" My cousin holds up his hand, pointed game cones stuck onto each finger. He waggles one at me, a red piece.
"Fire," I tell him, rolling my eyes. Why my cousins can't keep the storyline straight, I'll never know. "Okay, so I'm the witch and I've cursed you so that everything you touch turns to fire."
The tiles on my grandmother's basement floor serve as lava, rock islands, entire oceans, tundra drifts of Antarctica. At every family gathering, we are down here, spinning our imaginations around the spiderwebs beneath the steps, and without knowing it, I'm writing. I'm the only girl, and I'm always in charge of what we are playing. I'm constantly adding, changing, accommodating, and years later, when sitting at my college desk, I realized the process of writing - creating, revising, editing, deleting, inserting, reorganizing - has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.
As a child, I gravitated to books and writing. I'd overwhelm my mother with requests to read, so much so she had to limit me to one hour a day, during which she'd patiently sit as I curled up beside her, a stack of books taller than me on the other side of the couch. In third grade, I began writing my first novel, a horror story about a rolling eyeball. By fifth grade, I'd found a writing partner and we completed a book, alternating writing of chapters, part horror story and part middle school drama. By the time I hit high school, I'd discovered poetry, and since then, have written poems almost every day of my life. I've got stacks of notebooks filled, my own kind of journals, penned in verses instead of paragraphs.
I never considered myself a "real" writer because I wasn't published, albeit for a Silver Key I won in a local writing competition for high schoolers when I was in tenth grade. As a college freshman I had a glimmer of hope when Bloomsburg University's literary magazine, Warren, published a stream-of-consciousness short story of mine, but nothing much came on its heels, mostly because I didn't try.
Eventually, I graduated and landed a full-time teaching position, and needed to continue my education in order to receive my permanent certification. The opportunity to earn a degree in Creative Writing was laid open before me, and despite my reservations, I applied. I found myself immersed in a culture of writing over the next two years, and for the first time, I thought of myself as belonging among a group of literary, talented, accomplished people. I began to think I could make my lifelong dream of becoming a published author a reality.
Fast forward to now, and I'm a mother of two young girls. I've been working on a novel for years, only getting to write in small pockets of time, in fits and starts, sometimes chipping away toward the finish line for weeks, sometimes letting it stay buried for months. With my youngest daughter's birth, I took a long enough maternity leave to last the rest of the school year, and made a promise to myself to work on my writing more seriously. I re-read Maya Angelou and marveled at the simplistic and powerful nature of Nayyirah Waheed. I connected with other writers and found a beautiful friend and motivator in Tessa Shaffer (Heaven Has No Regrets). And I began to write. Really write. I researched contests and calls for submissions and honed my work and submitted, without fear of the results. And though I lost and received kindly worded form letters of rejection, I also received acceptances.
And so, here I am, published and pursuing more. Here I am, with an author website and writing goals and a determination renewed in my heart, because this dream of mine is no longer just about me. It's about my daughters and the example I set. I don't want them to grow up listening to me talk about how I wish I would've tried to do something with my writing. I want them to witness me doing it, and to be by my side when my ultimate dream comes true, because if there's anything I've learned from those early days with my cousins, it's that anything is possible, if you let it be.
"Fire," I tell him, rolling my eyes. Why my cousins can't keep the storyline straight, I'll never know. "Okay, so I'm the witch and I've cursed you so that everything you touch turns to fire."
The tiles on my grandmother's basement floor serve as lava, rock islands, entire oceans, tundra drifts of Antarctica. At every family gathering, we are down here, spinning our imaginations around the spiderwebs beneath the steps, and without knowing it, I'm writing. I'm the only girl, and I'm always in charge of what we are playing. I'm constantly adding, changing, accommodating, and years later, when sitting at my college desk, I realized the process of writing - creating, revising, editing, deleting, inserting, reorganizing - has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.
As a child, I gravitated to books and writing. I'd overwhelm my mother with requests to read, so much so she had to limit me to one hour a day, during which she'd patiently sit as I curled up beside her, a stack of books taller than me on the other side of the couch. In third grade, I began writing my first novel, a horror story about a rolling eyeball. By fifth grade, I'd found a writing partner and we completed a book, alternating writing of chapters, part horror story and part middle school drama. By the time I hit high school, I'd discovered poetry, and since then, have written poems almost every day of my life. I've got stacks of notebooks filled, my own kind of journals, penned in verses instead of paragraphs.
I never considered myself a "real" writer because I wasn't published, albeit for a Silver Key I won in a local writing competition for high schoolers when I was in tenth grade. As a college freshman I had a glimmer of hope when Bloomsburg University's literary magazine, Warren, published a stream-of-consciousness short story of mine, but nothing much came on its heels, mostly because I didn't try.
Eventually, I graduated and landed a full-time teaching position, and needed to continue my education in order to receive my permanent certification. The opportunity to earn a degree in Creative Writing was laid open before me, and despite my reservations, I applied. I found myself immersed in a culture of writing over the next two years, and for the first time, I thought of myself as belonging among a group of literary, talented, accomplished people. I began to think I could make my lifelong dream of becoming a published author a reality.
Fast forward to now, and I'm a mother of two young girls. I've been working on a novel for years, only getting to write in small pockets of time, in fits and starts, sometimes chipping away toward the finish line for weeks, sometimes letting it stay buried for months. With my youngest daughter's birth, I took a long enough maternity leave to last the rest of the school year, and made a promise to myself to work on my writing more seriously. I re-read Maya Angelou and marveled at the simplistic and powerful nature of Nayyirah Waheed. I connected with other writers and found a beautiful friend and motivator in Tessa Shaffer (Heaven Has No Regrets). And I began to write. Really write. I researched contests and calls for submissions and honed my work and submitted, without fear of the results. And though I lost and received kindly worded form letters of rejection, I also received acceptances.
And so, here I am, published and pursuing more. Here I am, with an author website and writing goals and a determination renewed in my heart, because this dream of mine is no longer just about me. It's about my daughters and the example I set. I don't want them to grow up listening to me talk about how I wish I would've tried to do something with my writing. I want them to witness me doing it, and to be by my side when my ultimate dream comes true, because if there's anything I've learned from those early days with my cousins, it's that anything is possible, if you let it be.