The Long and Short of It – and The First Post

Once upon a time in a rainy and cranky corner of the world called Tacoma, Washington, a little baby girl was born. She grew up in a happy home on the edge of a swamp that was more lovely than it sounds, despite the muck and mud and mosquitoes in the summer. It was quiet and serene, and because there were no other children who lived in the neighborhood, isolated and often lonely.

She grew up with books and barbies and dogs named Sam and Rache. She cut out pictures from magazines and pasted them in handmade books, either stapled or glued together, wrote captions, which were actually stories, and read them to whoever would listen, but no one really did, even though they thought it was cute.

In high school she continued to write, mostly short stories, some poetry, as teenage girls will do, and developed a liking to the encouragement and accolades, though small and unimportant, were really enormous and very important.

She graduated and realized, with an attitude too grown-up to be mature, that writing paid fuck all, and she would never be able to support herself with words.

She saw The Silence of the Lambs in a movie theatre, and decided to be a forensic biologist.

At Seattle University, in the thick of the city of wet pavement and grunge, she failed chemistry and got a “D” in biology. For this pleasure, she paid student loans, at $50 a month for several years. Chalked it up to “life experience” and developed a taste for cheap merlot wine.

She went to vocational school and became a pharmacy technician. For ten years. She still read books, sometimes, but they were often of the self-help kind.

A turn of events, a store transfer, She met the man of her dreams. And got married. And had a baby, and another, and another. For ten more years.

At this point, she wondered, where she went and who she was now. She wrote an essay about it.

She enrolled in an online school, Southern New Hampshire University, and earned a bachelors degree in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing. She applied to and was accepted to the MFA low-residency program from the same school. This required five trips to New Hampshire in two years.

She wrote a novel.

And she started a blog.