I’ve been writing since, well, I could write. In elementary school, I wrote a book of poems about everything from penguins, to why I hated school. They were cute and pithy and terrible and by God I made those verses rhyme.
In third grade, we got to write a story, illustrate it, and “publish” it in hardback form. I reveled in the process. I remember trying to write a super dramatic story that would make the reader cry. I was, as you might imagine, unsuccessful. I was nine.
In middle school and high school, the writing assignments were always my favorites. AP English was my happy place. I still remember the names of my favorite English teachers: Kahoutek, Marsh, Berner. To this day I am in awe of their ability to tell the story of a story, to make a bunch of hormonal teenagers believe literature had something to say to them, to cry while they watched The Outsiders or Braveheart for the millionth time to show us what symbolism meant, while also never, ever taking any shit.
In college, I loved my Great Texts and Spanish courses and was an editor and contributor to the school literary magazine. A master’s degree in Hispanic Linguistics and Literature led to more reading and writing, this time exclusively in Spanish. A Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature allowed me to spend five dirt-poor, glorious years teaching, reading, researching, and yes, writing. For my comprehensive exams, after passing the oral exam, I wrote more than 40 pages in 48 hours. It was exhilarating. A dissertation completion fellowship helped me write my dissertation in a little over a year because I was able to write full time without having to teach. I researched and wrote at home for anywhere from 2-14 hours a day for an entire year.
After leaving academia, I kind of stopped writing. Professionally, I began to focus more on teaching, tutoring, and editing, and writing my own ideas fell by the wayside. Coupled with the birth of three children and my husband’s medical training, I eventually stopped writing at all.
In 2018-2019, I made a decision to make time for things I enjoyed, which led me to think about writing again. It still felt kind of selfish, or silly, or both. I hadn’t written just for the sake of writing since I was a child – why should I start again now?
In an effort to “do it right,” I reached out to some English teacher colleagues of mine for advice. What books should I read? What advice did they have? One said to start writing every day, and the other suggested reading The Artist’s Way. Both suggestions turned out to be excellent advice.
Around the same time, my parents sold my childhood home and I found three documents from childhood that gave me the confidence boost I needed to write:
1. An entry in a first-grade classroom memory book that said “I want to be a teacher.” I had, indeed, always wanted to be a teacher. And I became one. And I loved it. Wow, I thought. Maybe I did know myself back then.
2. A third grade “about me” page where I answered the prompt “When I grow up I plan to…” with “be an author who writes childrens [sic] books.” Hmm. I wanted to be an author too?
3. A self-created Time magazine cover from some unknown date in elementary school with a self portrait, my first and last name, and the word “Writer” next to it. Ok, ok, I thought. I’ll start writing again.
Ok, let’s be honest. I do not feel like a “real writer,” I may never be a published author, and I will most certainly never be on the cover of Time.
But finding these things did remind me of who I was, and who I have always been. So I decided I owed it to myself honor my true Self and, as Julia Cameron would say, my Inner Artist, and write.
So for more than a year, I wrote. Morning pages, journal entries, lists, emails, reflections, notes in my phone while rocking and breastfeeding babies, attempts at poetry in English and in Spanish. Some days I started to go back and edit, cleaning up language, syntax, redundancies, and more. This was the real work of writing, the returning to the draft to pick it apart, or polish it, or reimagine it.
For another year, when the Covid pandemic hit and began to drag on, I did a little less writing, and a little more revision and editing. And I bought myself a domain name, thinking that perhaps one day I would share my writing there. And for a year, I taught myself WordPress and Divi, and built myself a blog website.
Like most writers, I’ve been terrified to share my writing. It was difficult enough to get started and create something. Share it with the world? OH GOD NO. This stuff stays right here with me forever until I die.
So why did I decide to share, after two years of writing, beginning to revise, and building myself a website?
1. For motivation to keep writing and editing.
2. Because I read somewhere that writing was never meant to be one-sided; it is a conversation between the writer and the reader. Not everything you write needs a reader, but maybe some of it should have one.
3. To learn, grow, and improve as a writer and a creative being.
4. When I was lost and trying to figure out my life, reading other people’s stories on the internet, even if they didn’t look exactly like mine, helped me. So maybe something I write could help someone, too.
I am not going to post regularly, necessarily. Well, I might post about it when I have shared a new essay or recipe or something. But I am genuinely not interested in promoting this blog, or where I fall on Google hits, or getting followers, or anything of the sort. It’s simply a writing home. If you read something that speaks to you or that you hate and you think you could help me make it better, I would love to hear those things. Other than that, this is just me being brave and vulnerable and sharing my writing with friends, family, and maybe a poor unsuspecting stranger who trips over this site while searching for something else. Thanks for reading.
