My Story:

In many ways, my story begins with the recovery of my writing life, but I'll begin a little earlier.

First I loved writing.
Then I lost it.

I trust the occupations that draw us when we are children, when we still believe that anything is possible. When I was in second grade, I wanted to be the next Carolyn Keene, and I even started my own series, The Adventure Twins, featuring sister sleuths named after my best friend and myself.

By fourth grade I discovered a knack for meter and rhyme, and thought I could find some likely employment with Hallmark. But in eighth grade, my writing dreams took a sharp turn off course. My English class had just started a poetry unit. One night, I left my Hallmark moves behind and wrote the first poem that was really deep. The next day, when the teacher asked for volunteers to share their work, my arm shot up. I stood and read, and there was a positive response.

Then the student behind me raised his hand. He stood up and read a poem that was so stunning, it made mine evaporate from memory. I decided in that moment, "There's no point writing. Someone else has already said it, and they've said it better." I gradually shifted my course work toward math and science.

In college I discovered that my classmate had ripped his poem off from Edgar Allen Poe, verbatim. It would be ten more years before I unraveled the decision I'd made in response to that episode.

When I returned to writing, all those years later, it was still there waiting for me, and when I found Julia Cameron's course, The Artist's Way, my recovery kicked into high gear. The words spilling out in front of me forced me to acknowledge my compulsion to please others, and the way I hadn't learned to please myself first, or sometimes at all. The ground under my feet began to shift quickly once I started asking, What life do I want?

My husband and I had an inexplicable desire to live in New York City, despite having never visited. It floated out in the "someday, maybe" category, but as I wrote I began asking, Why not now? My husband was having a slow time lining up the kind of work he wanted, so he started looking in NYC. The phone didn't stop ringing--New York proved to be a great market for his skills and experience. Circumstances opened up before us like the Red Sea, and we moved to Brooklyn six weeks later.

Brooklyn suits me like my favorite pair of jeans, and I can't imagine another place where I'd rather be raising my girls. This is where I live and write--and as my writing life thrives in subway seats and at diner tables, I know what it means to be home.