so i guess i'm a writer

I've been writing since I was a kid – poetry, stream of consciousness, my insane version of a diary, which included lots of song lyrics and drawings for emphasis. I started in spiral notebooks until I discovered those bound black art journals. They were infinitely better because I could glue all kinds of polaroids and pictures all over the front. By the time I graduated high school, I had probably filled close to sixty of them. But I had never written a story, unless you counted the only moderately creative essays I had written for English class or the wildly creative ones I wrote for my best friend so her dad would let us go out on Saturday nights.

I can't remember the first story I wrote, but I know my first wave of stories were these Sandra Cisneros-style vignettes about my family and our Southern roots. Keep in mind, I mention Cisneros as a frame of reference. My stories were about as similar to hers as brown tap water is to Diet Coke. If you read my bio, you know how a feel about Diet Coke. In college, I focused on painting and I don't remember much of what I wrote. Probably a lot of venting and lists about my likes and dislikes (still one of my favorite things to write about). If there were only blogs back then.

I went back to my vignettes my first year of teaching third grade in Santa Monica, California. My students participated in Writer's Workshop, a sort of collaborative approach to creative writing. I had to model some writing for them, so I started writing about my family. My great-aunts, who ate at Stucky's (the South's version of Denny's) every day of their lives and sent their food back no matter what they ordered. My grandfather's African grey parrot, with a mouth that could put a trucker to shame. My grandmother found out later that mt grandfather got the bird from some fraternity guys. Mystery solved. The kids loved the stories, especially the one about the questionable usefulness of crocheted blankets, which I called Swiss cheese blankets. A blanket full of holes? What's the point?

I ended up taking classes in the UCLA Writer's Program. My teacher was the author Amy Bender, who at the time had just published The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. She was a great teacher and I wrote a lot of short stories for her. But the ones she loved were always the ones set in the South. I remember her telling me, "This is what you should be writing about."

Of course, I didn't listen. I wrote two books, which are buried in depths of crappy-book-Hell. One was a fantasy, the other realistic fiction. Neither one took place in the South & neither one worked. My friend, Margie (writer Margaret Stohl), had read my work and thought we should write something together. We decided to write something her daughters would like to read, something we'd want to read.

A few tacos, a paper napkin, and twelve weeks later we had written a book. Within a few months we had an agent and sold the book. Pure luck.

So I guess I'm a writer.