I still feel like this girl.
I've known I was a writer since I was eight years old and found my father's Playboy magazines in a basket beside my parents' bed. I was a little confused by the coy and beautiful ladies, but then I found, tucked inside, a few pages of typescript. He'd written a description of a hunt from the perspective of the deer. Now that was cool. And that same summer they took me to see Hamlet at the Shakespeare Festival in Fair Park. After watching the poor prince carried gravely out, bathed in blue light, how could I not want to write books? Making stories happen was the best, most divinely human thing in the world.
So I wrote poetry that creaked of my fondness for Simon and Garfunkel. I wrote short stories under the influence of Harlan Ellison. I wrote love ballads for my parents as if that would stop their marriage from dissolving. I kept journals, at first embarrassingly heavy with lists of What I Got For Christmas, but then moving on to the themes of adolescence and young adulthood. Why won't the mean kids just let me read? What if I'm secretly magic but just don't know it yet? What's happening to my family? What if there really were dragons, and I could be one? What if we're all imaginary? Is it really love if one of you is just a mind, and the other a body? If I concentrate, can I imagine infinity? How can he do this to me? And, eventually, What am I, anyway?
I heard about a college where you were expected to read all the Great Books* and do your own thinking about them. No professors with textbooks, just Aristotle, Plato, Locke, Hobbes, Hume. Euclid and Leibniz and Einstein. Dostoevsky and Hegel, Racine and Kant. Read the originals and think about them with others. I didn't know why they mattered, yet. But I thought if I could go do that, I would know what I wanted to say, when it was time to write. Technique could follow, what I needed was the whole dialectic of western civilization, in an orderly fashion, and with Virgil walking beside me.
*Yeah, I know. "All." But I was a kid.
So I wrote poetry that creaked of my fondness for Simon and Garfunkel. I wrote short stories under the influence of Harlan Ellison. I wrote love ballads for my parents as if that would stop their marriage from dissolving. I kept journals, at first embarrassingly heavy with lists of What I Got For Christmas, but then moving on to the themes of adolescence and young adulthood. Why won't the mean kids just let me read? What if I'm secretly magic but just don't know it yet? What's happening to my family? What if there really were dragons, and I could be one? What if we're all imaginary? Is it really love if one of you is just a mind, and the other a body? If I concentrate, can I imagine infinity? How can he do this to me? And, eventually, What am I, anyway?
I heard about a college where you were expected to read all the Great Books* and do your own thinking about them. No professors with textbooks, just Aristotle, Plato, Locke, Hobbes, Hume. Euclid and Leibniz and Einstein. Dostoevsky and Hegel, Racine and Kant. Read the originals and think about them with others. I didn't know why they mattered, yet. But I thought if I could go do that, I would know what I wanted to say, when it was time to write. Technique could follow, what I needed was the whole dialectic of western civilization, in an orderly fashion, and with Virgil walking beside me.
*Yeah, I know. "All." But I was a kid.
Details:
I graduated from St John's College, Annapolis. That's the Great Books school, not the one with awesome basketball.
I also earned an M.A. in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Maryland.
I am an editor and copyeditor at PAC: Books.
I'm a founding member of both San Francisco's Portuguese Artists Colony, and the S.F. Peninsula writing group The Finishing School (both est. 2010).
I have read at Chester's in Berkeley, regularly at PAC shows (FivePoints Arthouse, Chester's, Hotel Rex etc.), at Sausalito's Why There Are Words, and at the LitCrawl in San Francisco in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.
I've been published in Energeia, Fiction 365, and Omnibucket.
My fiction has been recognized by Narrative Magazine.
I also earned an M.A. in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Maryland.
I am an editor and copyeditor at PAC: Books.
I'm a founding member of both San Francisco's Portuguese Artists Colony, and the S.F. Peninsula writing group The Finishing School (both est. 2010).
I have read at Chester's in Berkeley, regularly at PAC shows (FivePoints Arthouse, Chester's, Hotel Rex etc.), at Sausalito's Why There Are Words, and at the LitCrawl in San Francisco in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.
I've been published in Energeia, Fiction 365, and Omnibucket.
My fiction has been recognized by Narrative Magazine.