Who am I, and Why Short Stories?
An introduction for new and existing subscribers
Hello Friends,
Whether you’re new here or you’ve been here since day one, you know I love reading and writing. I am a working writer. Currently, I have a book under contract, a nonfiction memoir hybrid, and I have this newsletter, plus my other one (FIRES) which is all about wildland fire and ecology. I have a lot of interests, and a very active (sometimes distracted) brain. I am always coming up with new ideas. About 10% of them actually stick.
I love a yearly project. This year I dabbled in living without social media. I left my nanny job and, after finishing yoga teacher training, began teaching yoga and taking paying writing jobs. When I was thinking about what kind of project I wanted to take on for 2022, I knew it needed to involve reading.
Stories have saved my life. If stories have saved your life then you know I’m not exaggerating. I grew up in a super unstable home with a single parent and no siblings. We moved a lot and my reality was never validated, always questioned. Books were an escape, and reading was the one thing I was good at. From a very young age I began writing my own stories, stapling paper together into books. I imagined being rescued by the Care Bears, imagined living in The Secret Garden or being a secret princess. Stories let me believe I was special. They also created a pathway out. A pretend future, where I was free to live my own life.
It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I discovered the magic of short stories. I was working as a wildland firefighter and tore my ACL, essentially landing myself out of a job. I had only a few semesters of community college under my belt, but I started contemplating going back to school. I’d always been a serious reader. Mostly novels, nonfiction, memoir. Then I found Junot Diaz’s book Drown. (Note: Junot Diaz has been accused of assault. I don’t endorse him, but this is part of my story). Those stories spoke to me in a way no stories had. They ignited my obsession with short stories. I began checking out books of short stories from the library: Mary Gaitskill, Sandra Cisneros, Ray Carver, Alice Munro. Then I began writing my own short stories.
I did go back to fighting fire. In 2010, I moved to Alaska and took a job with the Park Service. A month after moving, my mom died by suicide. This obliterated my world. Reading and writing were the only things that continued to make sense for me. Every book I read that summer is permanently imprinted in my memory. I carried a copy of Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart around with me everywhere, even in the Alaskan bush where we were fighting fires and trying to scare off the bears that wanted our food. I read The Return of the Native on my days off, laying on my plank bed and mattress pad, inside my little yurt which let in the bright daylight and dull light of midnight.
It was that summer I vowed to become a writer. I had been working on a story, “Sixteen in Vegas,” about a trip to Las Vegas I took as a teenager, where I was sexually assaulted. All my fiction was autobiographical, but the medium of fiction allowed me to reshape the story, to view it from afar and understand my experiences more deeply. I submitted the story to all the literary magazines I could find, and on my cover letter I wrote: I’ve only taken a few community college classes, and I don’t really know what I am doing.
An editor at the New Ohio Review, Mark Halliday, accepted me story and worked with me on revisions. This was when I first began to understand what goes into a short story. I wouldn’t have called myself a writer then, but now, even as I use the word “writer” to describe myself, I understand that I am not a master of the form, nor will I ever be.
But I can still love it when others get it right. And even when they don’t.
That editor encouraged me to go back to school, and I did. I began my undergraduate at Syracuse University when I was 32, then entered the creative writing graduate program at Syracuse when I was 35. I was the first person in my family to graduate high-school, and (obviously) the first to get a master’s degree.
During my MFA in creative writing at Syracuse, I studied short stories even more closely. They are strange little things. They can be long. They can be flash. But no matter their length every single sentence in a short story has to be doing something. Unlike a novel, there are no throwaway words or sentences. Everything is important and meaningful. This makes it remarkably difficult to write excellent short stories, but it makes reading excellent short stories a wonderful experience.
Along for my story ride will be my lovely companion Edna, a rescue cat who joined me just two months ago.
What Does the Newsletter Have to Offer?
There are two main functions of this newsletter for 2022. The first is to document my story a day, to share story resources with my readers (and writers??), and create community for those of us who love short stories.
The second function is my Artist’s Way Exploration Group. I’ll be creating signups for this in the coming week, as well as a schedule for weekly meetups so we can share with each other on our path.
Where do I get the time to do all of this?
Well, that’s where you come in. This newsletter is categorically free. I want it to be accessible to everyone who wants to participate and enjoy. But, as someone who doesn’t have anything even close to a trust fund, I also need to support myself so I have time to make this. I live with rheumatoid arthritis, which means that the healthiest thing for me is to be a writer, rather than a wildland firefighter or a nanny or a brake press operator or a server in a restaurant or a barista (all jobs I have done in the past).
For this to work, I need it to be financially viable. That, honestly, doesn’t take much. If I were to break it down, I’d need five monthly subscribers for every hour of work I do here to make $35 per hour. The more paying subscribers I have, the more of my time I can devote to this newsletter, the better this newsletter will be for everyone who reads it, whether they are paying or not. So, if you can afford it, please do become a paying subscriber. You’ll be paying for others who can’t pay, and you’ll be supporting everything this newsletter can become.
Lastly: Share this! Share it far and wide. I am so excited for this journey and so excited to have you along for the ride!
