I’ve been writing and thinking about writing ever since middle school when a nun not much taller than I was in seventh grade pulled me aside and handed me a piece of paper with a magazine cutout of the word GOLD glued to the top of the page and said, “Here, write about this.”
That was it. She saw something I didn’t and I’ve never stopped searching for what she saw that fall afternoon when she asked me to wait as the class was dismissed, heading home. I was heading elsewhere and didn’t know it.
I’ve had moderate success as a writer, if by success we mean publications and (some) readers eyeing my work. I’m a professor, which means writing has helped me enter teaching in the academy. I haven’t won a Pulitzer, a MacArthur Fellowship, or a “special chair of this or that” at any academic institution — no best sellers.
Which means that the diminutive nun of my youth was trying to open me up to something complex, even subtle about writing.
Breathing, eating, sleeping, and writing sway equally with me. I know that now. If I stop breathing, I’ll die. If I stop writing, I’ll die too. It’s like that. I have to write. I don’t have a choice in the matter. I write for me. I write to live. Writing is physical, lifeblood.
In the seventh grade a door opened and I walked through into a world I imagine in sentences and images and words…
