I started writing as a young girl because stories materialized in my mind, like waking dreams, and I found that when I started to write them down, details unraveled: a stray cat walking down my block evolved into a story about a house cat who had lost his way after his owner had dropped him off miles away from home due to his son’s allergies, and the cat, Sylvester, was taken in by a kind family that had a little girl like me who would love him so that he never felt abandoned again. I had a friend at school who seemed sad, and pencil in hand, I was able to articulate the nuances of her home life, in which her mother was distant to her, and how each night she looked up at the stars and prayed for her real mother to show up at her adoptive house and take her back to her home with the brothers and sisters she had never gotten to meet. My mind was full of stories that were prompted by conversations or interactions with people; I was always observing the way people moved or spoke; the relationship between actions and words. My imagination was able to create beginnings, middles, and endings, and I was able to compose dialogue, as if someone were whispering it into my ear.
For a long time, I thought everyone experienced the world as I did, their minds mazes of stories, but as a teen I realized that wasn’t so. While I was always ready to analyze and articulate feelings and comments, my friends often grew impatient with my introspections, in a teenage, who cares fashion. That led me to turn inward and refrain from sharing the minutia of my mind, which prompted a stronger relationship with my journal. In my journal, my ideas abounded: in an hour I could plot ten possible stories or characters or inventions to create. I learned not to broadcast the depths of my imagination as I didn’t want to seem weird amidst my friends. Back then, it was more important to me that I fit in and passed for a girl like everyone else. In Brooklyn in the 1980’s, being different was not cool.
It wasn’t until I was in college, an English major, that I shared a completed short story. My Hemingway and Faulkner seminar professor, Dr. Bloom, presented the class with an option for our final exam: we could craft a short story or write yet another research paper. I opted for the short story. It was the first time I was going to write a story that wasn’t for me to tuck away and deem a failure, but to turn in for a grade. “The First Time,” was about a woman climbing a mountain in Europe who had recently lost her husband in an accident. Yes, there were undertones of Hemingway, whose fiction had captured my imagination and claimed real estate in my soul, but this time the protagonist was a woman, and there was no inkling of a love story with a man; rather, it was about the protagonist finding her way, herself, and her reason for being as she embarked on her climb to this next chapter of her life, alone.
Dr. Bloom gave me an A on the story and recommended I take Professor Richard Frost’s creative writing class. Professor Frost, a poet and jazz musician, was feared amongst the English major crowd – someone who was not afraid to tell students if their writing sucked. The thought of taking the course petrified me. In a creative writing class, there was a chance for me to be exposed as a wannabe writer, someone who should give it up and move on. But I wanted to give it a try, because back then, like now, writing was more than a compulsion for me. It was how I related to the world, how I made sense of myself and people and places and choices and obstacles around me. Writing was a way to navigate and explore possibilities that lived within me and around me. Writing was my way of exploring the directions a life could take, and how the decisions one made along the way impacted one’s journey. Writing was a way of losing myself and finding myself.
Taking Professor Frost’s class was the first time in my life I was creating space and time to write short stories that were going to be reviewed, critiqued, and graded. The first few classes we met as a group, and then the class was to transition into weekly one-on-one sessions with Professor Frost, in his office, during which time we would go over stories we turned in to him the prior week. My first story for the class, “The Illusion of Eden,” was about a lonely middle-aged woman named Eden who worked as a cashier in a grocery store, who in her delusional state believed that the happy family in a picture frame that the grocery store sold was her own family.
When I sat across from Professor Frost in his office to discuss the story, he leaned towards me and asked, “Who wrote this story?”
My heart began to race, and I felt my throat closing. Who wrote the story? “I did,” I said. “It’s my story. I wrote it this week.”
He looked at me and nodded his head, tapping the printed-out story with his notes scribbled in the margins with a pen before he broke the gaze and looked down at the story.
I don’t remember now if he called me a writer then, or told me I had potential, or that I was talented, but I know that what he told me was enough to inspire me to keep going, to work harder, and to let me feel, even if it was fleeting, that I could be a writer. I went on to turn in a host of stories: “The Manichean King’s Misfortune,” about a little invisible guy who lived on a man’s shoulder and directed him how to live his life; “The Spring of the Fall,” about a 10-year-old girl who was murdered with a baseball bat by her stepfather one spring and the protagonist attended the funeral with her parents; there were mafia stories – the product of my growing up in Brooklyn – and stories about relationships gone wrong. There were stories about people who started over in their lives moving to new towns and cities, but what was beginning to become clear early on, was that a theme of missing people came up again and again for me. Sometimes the people were physically missing, as in the story where a young girl’s brother had joined a cult, while other times they had the power to appear day after day, without being there.
I learned so many lessons during that first writing class, one of which had to do with writing for others versus myself. Those early stories were not for me – they were for my professor, and it would take years until I got to the real stories in which my characters spoke from a mind and heart that was no longer afraid to disappoint another person, but were driven to tell the story, its pain, its beauty, its voice all intact. I believe that first you write for recognition – you want and need others to justify your writing, to tell you that you are good, as if that gives you a reason to keep writing. It is something you must prove to your circle of friends and family, to yourself, because how else can you justify the hours you spend tucked away writing? Eventually, you write because you honor and succumb to the act of writing itself, like how you first sit in the sun for vanity to get a tan, and later love the sun for the warmth it fills you with, for the life force, the energy.
After college, I pursued a Master of Arts in English and focused on 19th and 20th century American Literature. I became fascinated with how women were depicted in stories – from Henry James’ Isabel Archer to Hemingway’s Lady Brett Ashley and Catherine Barkley. There was Anna Karenina, too, and I began to perceive some male writers as sympathetic to the women they created versus using them as foils for their male counterparts. Interestingly, in my fiction, I often wrote from a male perspective, so perhaps these men writing from a women’s perspective collided with something in me that wondered if we are better at observing the manners and mindsets of the opposite sex.
During graduate school, between working and studying, I continued to write my own fiction when I could. I also dabbled in poetry, as coming upon John Ashbury’s “The System,” I realized that poems could tell stories via prose and that the rules were each writer’s choice. A resident of the upper east side, I learned about the fiction classes at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center, and I applied, sending in my manuscript and praying. Entry into that program began the next phase of my writer life, only now I was in graduate school, and trying to carve my path in a publishing career. Writing was no longer a whenever-I-had-the-time habit, but one that I scheduled into my life by waking up at 5 am to squeeze in an hour or two of creative time. That was also the start of my Saturday and Sunday vanishing acts, in which after a run, my laptop in my bag, I occupied nooks and crannies in Barnes and Noble and local book stores like Borders that created spaces for writers and readers, and spent hours fleshing out ideas and stories and editing.
First there was Joe Caldwell at the 92nd Street Y and then there was Joan Silber, whose workshop I took a few times, and then Wesley Gibson, who I worked with for years. At the 92nd Street Y, I got to be a writer and receive critiques and input on my stories from other writers whose work I revered. I had never felt so alive and so panicked as when my stories were up for discussion in the workshop and I got to listen to writer peers critique it – for better or worse. Being in a workshop and allowing peers to read your writing is like allowing them to look at your heart and mind through a magnifying glass.
Eventually, after my MA was complete and I was taking classes towards a Ph.D. at the Graduate Center, all while pursuing a career, I applied for a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Brooklyn College. Getting into the fiction program was the equivalent of winning the lottery for me. It was perhaps my first validation that someone other than my dear friends and the kind individuals I met at all the writing workshops was willing to take a chance on me and help me to develop my writing skills. It was at Brooklyn College’s MFA program that I met Irini Spanidou and Jonathan Baumbach, both of whom helped me to shape my fiction in numerous ways. This was pre-9/11 and the world felt somehow lighter, and Brooklyn College was an incredible melting pot of ideas and people and ethnicities.
During my MFA program, I had a variety of meltdowns: the stress of working full time, writing whenever I had a moment to spare, hiding away on Saturdays and Sundays to critique my MFA peer stories and write my own, and finding time for friends and boyfriends overwhelmed me. It didn’t seem possible to squeeze it all in, and yet somehow, I did. I am grateful for whatever kept me moving towards my various goals, all of which mattered to me. I didn’t want to quit my day job: I loved publishing, loved being involved in the world of books and authors and writing as it taught me about the business of writing, and the realities of it – proof readers and fact checkers and designers and marketing and finance teams – and that in the end, books had to sell for anyone to make a living by writing. It also validated my passion and helped me to know I was not alone in my pursuits – there were a whole world of creatives out there. Plus, working full time was a good back-up plan for me. I was too scared to take myself seriously as a writer. It was too competitive and there were people whose work was superior to my own. I was able to understand that without it crippling me; when it came to writing, I was able to champion other authors’ work and admire it without jealousy or anxiety.
The summers during my MFA, I began to apply to summer intensive writing workshops, first at Iowa’s Writing Workshop, and then at Rappahannock Writers Workshop, and later, after my MFA was complete, at Skidmore College. It was at those workshops that I got to work with Lee K. Abbot, Michael Parker, and Janet Peery – all of whom shaped my writer instincts in so many critical ways. But beyond that, those summer workshops taught me about the other side of writing – that us writers needed to stick together and support one another, and if there’s an opportunity for us to laugh, let loose, and have fun, we needed to do that, too. Next came the Hemingway Days Festivals in Key West, and soon after, I became involved in the Key West Literary Seminar and Workshops, which led me to meet a whole new array of mentors and authors, the likes of Susan Richards Shreve, Wally Lamb, and the wonderful Lee Smith.
I have always been interested in people – how they live, what sustains them, what they dream and aspire to when they turn out the lights each night and what their first waking thought is each morning. I am interested in what people believe in, and why. Walking home in New York City to my apartment on the upper east side all those years, I glanced up at the lights shining in apartments and wondered what the inhabitants were cooking for dinner; where they worked all day; what they wanted in life. What reinvested them in living when their lives got challenging? I write stories about people and places and pain and love and happiness, mostly because I am curious. Over time, that curiosity has led to compassion, and empathy, too. I learned early on that I was able to insert myself into another’s mind and heart and feel their pain, experience days in their lives. I was filled with a deep-rooted wonder of what it was like to be another person, to feel their feelings and walk out of and into their homes each day. My own sufferings and craziness led me to understand and accept that just like me, other people had stuff going on, too. Over time, I acquired patience to let stories unfold like seasons and years. When I read great stories, I am indebted to the author for sharing them, for going the journey to see the story through. Because like so many things in life, it is always easier to quit, to abandon a story, then it is to keep going, to see it through to the end. I am grateful to so many authors for providing me with an entry into the worlds they know or imagine.
People often ask me about MFA programs and if they are worth it – if they help. To me, the answer is a resounding yes, if only because they provide artists with community and the opportunity to be a writer, and sometimes, that is not only the first step, but it’s the only step one needs to begin to take oneself seriously. Once an artist commits to the process of creation and editing, and the perseverance necessary to produce something that is meaningful, anything is possible. Writing is powerful – it can shape and shift ideas, and enable others to experience lives, locations, and stories they will never live. Stories change our lives, for better or worse, but for the writer, the experience is a blend of grit and grace and patience. David McCullough’s statement has served as a constant reminder: “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard. “
For me, the creative pursuit is ongoing and unfolding as after all of these years, logging so many hours as a professor, as corporate professional, and more often than not loving the corporate world with its fast pace and its mover-shaker mentality, nothing will ever hold the allure for me that writing or reading a great book does. Both enable me to tap into those places within myself where the magic lives, where dreams begin to peep out into reality, and where I have the power to move mountains in a peaceful and thoughtful way. Over time, I have also fallen in love with writing nonfiction, with its need for facts and honesty in a different way, and I have grown comfortable writing from a first-person perspective, too.
When you write, and it is going well, you are inside the story and it’s all there is and you come out of the writing trance the way you walk off a plane – like you are exiting an alternate universe during which time the world plunged forward, while you were off in another stratosphere. It requires courage and commitment to transport oneself and to create something from one’s mind and heart and share it with others. My own journey with writing has been full of ups and downs – I have doubted myself and let go of the doubt – because in the end, writing has been my savior – my way in and through life, my own personal navigation system. If it was just meant to help me, I’ll take it, and if my writing should impact another person in some meaningful way, what a wonderful gift.