I’ve been writing since the second grade when my Hello Kitty diary filled with entries of who my boyfriend was. It changed weekly but that’s ok, it was an honorary title. In middle school I wrote snarky poetry in the local paper and was published in an anthology of children’s poems. I still have the “World Of Poetry – Frankly, I’m their best poet” mug, because what kid doesn’t need a coffee mug.

There were fallow years, like college where I mostly wrote papers and early marriage and parenthood where it was toasts and prayers if anything. Finally, I started listening to my favorite human who kept asking why I wasn’t writing when it was so important to me. I went searching to see if my writer self was still in there somewhere.

That was ten years ago. What started at a local writer’s meeting (shout out Chanhassen Writer’s Group!) led to a few NaNoWriMo years, led to flash fiction contests, publication in an anthology, some editing gigs, and now a novel winding its way towards the world one edit at a time.

All of this is presided over by a nasty inner critic who thinks I might be just a tad old to start tilting at windmills. I’ve considered it closely, and after years of vacillating between thinking I was Aldonza or sometimes Dulcinea, I’ve decided I am neither fallen nor redeemed.

I am Don Quixote. I choose to believe in the magic of writing; what it can do for me and how it connects people. If that makes me foolish, so be it.

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