Wynken, Blynken, Nod, and Football Cats

Some of my earliest memories are of being read to by my Mom and Dad. We always had books in the
house, and trips to the library were a constant adventure. Every week, my mom brought me and my
younger brothers to the (old) Selby Public Library in Sarasota, Florida, and after we checked our our big
bag of books, we would sit in the grass by the intercoastal canal watch the fish jump while we ate a
picnic lunch and read our books. Wynken, Blynken, and Nod was a favorite of mine, and when I found a
favorite of anything, I requested it nearly nightly. My parents like to tell stories of me as a two-year-old,
interjecting when they started to nod off while reading or tried to condense the story, No mommy,
what it really says is... Even then, the exact wording mattered and I wasnt about to let anyone skip
pages in my favorite stories.

As an older child, I was constantly creating things. I created intricate backstories for characters; I spent a
lot of time naming them, drawing them, building their houses from cardboard boxes, and acting out
their adventures in the backyard. When my younger brothers grew old enough to participate, we
created worlds together, and the concession to them was that they all had to involve sports. From this
necessary compromise arose Football Cats. It was exactly what it sounds like, a loosely organized story
around cats who formed a football team. We started with three, then added more and more as we
needed plot diversity. I loved having the chance to be anything I wanted. I could be a boy, I could be a
sports star, I could be a leaderor, you, know, a cat. I was a weird kid and it was glorious. Looking back,
Im so grateful for all the years I enjoyed being as creative as I could, without the pressure to look cool in
front of the popular kids or the need to make perfectly-structured work.

From Crapola to Mango Street

Ninth grade was my first year in a traditional school since early Elementary, and though I did fine
academically, it was not an easy period. I was painfully shy, to the point that I packed extra pencils so
that I would never have to stand up and feel people's eyes on me as I watch to the sharpener. Only a
few weeks into the first semester, our world history teacher died of cancer, and was shortly replaced by
a new teacher, straight out of college. On his first day, he informed us that we would no longer be
writing the sort of terrible filler sentences that we as exceptional students had no doubt gotten away
with for years. Any sentences containing phrases like, All throughout history Americans have... or
and things like this make our world the place it is today, would be returned with the word CRAPOLA
written in red across the page. At least he warned us. For a class of elite students who'd never been told
their writing was anything but great, this was exactly as harsh as it needed to be, and it forced me to
begin to actually think about using words that said something real, unique, and worthwhile.

I excelled in the rest of high school, especially after moving the next year to North Carolina and into a
much smaller high school in which I didn't have to beat out an entire IB program to be valedictorian. I
was very comfortable with the sort of academic writing that is rewarded in standardized tests--well-
structured, including clearly-stated examples from texts, with little creativity of form, and not much of
the writers opinion. Safe writing got me through High School and most of my undergrad as a college
student. As an undergrad at Gardner-Webb, I wrote my thesis on perspectives of Home in Sandra
Cisneros The House on Mango Street. Practically, it was an excellent way to combine my two majors,
English and Spanish, and I actually got to use a few Spanish-language sources in my research. I'm happy
with the project, though looking back I can see I was young and not ready to push the envelope and say
something more personally risky.
The Tree in the Storm
After graduation, I left the academic world for a while, working in college admissions, coaching
swimming, and raising my two sons, Liam and Rhys. I didnt write much until after my son Rhys was
born, and everything changed. What I would later realize was severe postpartum depression and anxiety
swept in like a monsoon. I questioned everything about who I am, what I believe, and what I'm
supposed to do with my life. The image that always came to me during this season was a tree, uprooted.
I started writing again, recording dark thoughts in a pink Moleskin that surely wasnt ready for all that
was unleashed inside it. Eventually, I found medication that worked and people helped me out of the
darkness, and I began to see a tiny bit of hope. I began to see myself as a new tree, just a tiny shoot
barely poking its spring green leaves out of the ground, but still being blown nearly sideways. I wrote
constantly and ferociously about family, upbringing, faith, my children, and my husband, and found both
catharsis and clarity.

I don't read that notebook now, but it sits on my shelf as a reminder of the emotional and spiritual
growth, like a tree, growing deeper roots and spreading out, stronger, into the sunshine. From this
experience I learned that I need writing to know myself. My opinions, thoughts, and feelings don't come
quickly or easily to me; they have to be worked through before I could ever feel and name them, and its
vital that I do that. I still keep a notebook, and though I don't write in it all the time, I use it to record
little bits of words that catch my ear, work through things in times of difficulty, to write down the
ridiculous things my children say.

The Next Bit of the Journey

I'm very sure that someday the next section in my writing autobiography will be grad school. My old
writing styles arent coming naturally anymore and that's hard. During the next two years in this
program, Ill be attempting to forge a new voice and find professional direction as a writer or editor,
homeschooling a second-grader and a preschooler, coaching college swimming, and hopefully still being
a pleasant person who occasionally makes dinner and talks to her husband. It's a lot. But I really am
looking forward to the growth inherent in the process, to learning new and better ways to write, and
seeing what comes next in this journey.