My Journey to Writing
I wrote my first story at age six about a catdog, a creature that was half-cat, half-dog, long before Nickelodeon aired “The Adventures of CatDog.” When my sons were little, we discovered that show together, and it jarred me. Not because I thought some network showrunner had found my lost pages, tossed during one of my family’s moving purges, but because it reminded me how much I used to create.
As a kid, I loved drawing and inventing strange stories. In high school, I became one of those angst-ridden teens who stayed up late writing poems, convinced I could snag a soul person, turn the crush I had on my chemistry teacher into an A grade, and figure out how to win the State Debate competition with my words. (Spoiler: I did not unlock poetic euphoria, though I did place second in State for debate.) I was also absolutely certain I was destined to be a pediatric neurosurgeon.
So, when I took a creative writing class in college just to check off a language arts requirement and the professor wrote, “You should think about studying this, you have a knack,” I kept walking toward med school like the universe hadn’t just scribbled a huge hint in red ink across my IBM Selectric Courier-10 assignment.
“I kept leaning toward the existential choose-your-own-adventure path…”
I didn’t become a pediatric neurosurgeon. Instead, I got lost in a kind of identity freefall. Maybe I’d be a botanist. Or a psychologist. Or an interior designer. Each possibility felt like it could be me for a moment, but none of them really fit. I told myself (and my parents) that I just hadn’t found the right path yet, but in hindsight I think I was already circling my truth. It’s not that I wasn’t looking for a stable career. I was. I just kept leaning toward the existential choose-your-own-adventure path even if it came without health insurance.
The experience of seeing my first crazy idea, half-cat/half-dog on a screen reminded me that even the weirdest stories belong in the world. Especially the weird ones. I started writing again at night after the kids were in bed. First, just short stories and some poems. Then a novel about a schoolteacher fed up with schools being shut down and underfunded while professional sports franchises were out there printing money. She started hawking her school’s extracurriculars and major degree programs to big corporations and “Endorsement High” was born. It toddled along, grew some pages, and eventually collapsed under the weight of my not-there-yet writer chops. My craft hadn’t caught up to my imagination, but that was going to change.
“I was blown away, enchanted, and panicked by how much I didn’t know.”
Since I couldn’t afford writing conferences or classes, I searched for the next best thing and found it in libraries and used bookstores. I devoured books on writing. (Still do. I’m a sucker.) One of them, Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass, made my crazy obsession with writing feel less like an afterhours secret tryst and more like a calling. When years later, I scraped together enough money to attend one of his workshops, I was blown away, enchanted, and panicked by how much I didn’t know.
How does this speak to my growing identity as an author? For starters, I wasn’t even close to using that word. “Author” felt like a title reserved for someone with a book, or articles, or a research monograph. Something published. But I let myself wonder if I was a writer. Or a storyteller, because for me there was no writing without story.
The more I learned about writing craft, the more I battled insecurity, imposter syndrome, and time. Still, I laid down words and the first full draft I completed was about an autistic woman in the Arkansas swamp who was obsessed with finding the Ghost Bird, an extinct woodpecker she believed would give her life meaning. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was writing something personal. She became a stand-in for the part of me that needed silence, pattern, and purpose. Even though I couldn’t (wouldn’t) claim the title of author, I found a way to understand myself. Her autistic lens became a mirror for mine. One sentence at a time, I learned to process the emotional intensity of my inner world, not by escaping it, but by shaping it into language.
“My voice felt like something I spent more time burying than excavating.”
My road to writership took a direct path through motherhood, through my kids’ dreams and their educational pursuits. Late-night meetups with the blank page became fewer and farther between, but I never completely stopped. When my sons chose music as their career path and their love language, I started a novel about two musician brothers searching for their missing father in the abandoned subway tunnels beneath Brooklyn. In real life, their father wasn’t missing, but I couldn’t seem to stop writing into that ache of wanting or searching. Maybe it reflected some insecurity of my own. Or maybe I just needed to write toward stuff that was unresolved. Either way, the story found me, and I completed my second rough draft with no thought of myself as an author, since neither of these novels were anything more than thick piles of paper languishing in the wicker baskets behind my desk.
As the years passed and my kids grew, I kept learning about craft, reading more intentionally, experimenting with form, but I struggled to find my identity as a writer. My voice felt like something I spent more time burying than excavating. Over time, that started to shift in a way I didn’t expect. As a parent, my kids had always looked to me for permission, safety, guidance, for the sense that it was okay to become who they were. But as they grew into themselves, I found myself looking to them, watching them shape their own identities, pursue their career paths, and wrestle with challenges, often in the face of fear, setback, and uncertainty. Their courage pushed me to do the scariest thing I could think of, share my writing with strangers.
I submitted short stories to writing competitions like NYC Midnight and regional contests, winning some recognition. Honorable mentions. Runners up. Finalists. Those acknowledgments lit a spark, but they also uncovered questions I’d been asking myself for a while.
What does it mean to take up space as a writer? Where was my voice? What was my voice? And by “voice,” I didn’t just mean what I sounded like on the page. I meant, who was I speaking for? Was I really just writing (as I told my friends and family) for the fun of it? Or did I have something to say?
“If I have anything to tell others about starting late… it’s this: age isn’t limitation, it’s fortitude.”
Ironically, my current work-in-progress has helped me answer those questions, but its origin story happened ten years ago, when at age 53, I took a ballet class in order to get some exercise. Ballet hit hard, and before I knew it I went from two classes a week, to six, to twelve. A year after starting I went on pointe, and I’ve been dancing and performing ever since. As an adult dancer starting late in a world that values early bloomers, I’ve had to rewrite what passion and purpose look like for me. Turns out, I have something to say about it. For me, it looks like strength instead of perfection. It looks like showing up even when I’m sore, but also when I’m scared. And I’m scared a lot. If I have anything to tell others about starting late, about finding a path that’s more adventure than goals, it’s this: age isn’t limitation, it’s fortitude.
Not only did I step into an artform steeped in a gender binary and an expiration-date mindset, I also began (again inspired by my kids, but especially by my daughter who came out as gay in junior high) to claim my nonbinary identity. I’ve always known I was queer, even before I had words for it, but I spent 60+ years expressing only my feminine side, and the last ten hiding my full self behind a ballerina aesthetic. It was my current novel that pulled me into a more authentic version of myself, and into a future where I can use my identity and voice to help others discover theirs. (Yes, that teenage dream of inspiring change through words is still alive).
In “Pavlova’s Ghost,” a ballerina struggling to return to the stage after a brain injury is haunted by the ghost of Anna Pavlova and is forced to solve the mystery of a century-old queer love story passed down like a curse, one that left her grandmother dead, her mother traumatized, and her own safety threatened by possession, vengeance, and a restless need to finish what death couldn’t. For me, this novel isn’t just about actual ghosts, but metaphorical ones. It’s about queer love silenced by power, women erased by history, and the personal cost of carrying an unfinished story.
“…all of my protagonists are seekers. They move through liminal spaces. Swamps. Subways. Stages.”
There’s one more part of my journey to writer (and hopefully, eventually, author as I define it) that I need to share. I did in fact find a stable career. Since 2007, I’ve worked full-time as a back-of-the-book indexer, writing indexes for major university presses on books about race, philosophy, law, history, psychology, politics, gender. Indexing feeds the part of my brain that finds safety in sameness and order, and the artistic side that sees beauty in a structural representation of ideas and concepts. I now have over 2,000 books on Amazon with my indexes in them, but without my name on them. That’s what indexing is, invisible labor in service of someone else’s voice.
Looking back at how I first knew I wanted to become an author, how I developed my writing, and my writing goals in general, specifically for my current work, I can trace a crooked, sometimes hidden sometimes direct path to becoming. I’ve also realized that all of my protagonists are seekers. They move through liminal spaces. Swamps. Subways. Stages. Thresholds between invisibility and embodiment.
Like them, I’ve been moving toward visibility. Not because I need a spotlight beyond the stage, but because I’m finally ready to be seen.
