ABOUT ME
I was a storyteller before I knew my alphabet. As the youngest grandchild, when I visited my grandmother, I had to fight to be heard. I’d stand at her hip, words spilling from my mouth until I was breathless, incomprehensible, and purple in the face. She’d continue kneading her biscuits, her hands warm and stained from picking blackberries that morning.
She’d yell over the rest of the noise in the kitchen, “You’re going to have to learn to breathe if you want to be heard in this house.”
But the words, the stories, always came too fast. Even today, they trip, tangle, and fall over themselves in my mind. It has always been hard for my mouth (and my hands) to catch up.
At six, I listened to my first audiobook. Ironically, it was on my way to my grandmother’s house.
It was Lemony Snicket’s The Grim Grotto, retrieved on CD from a Cracker BarreI Country Store.
It’s been almost twenty years, and I’ve never forgotten that car ride.
Lemony Snicket did for me, and for many other young readers, what no one else has been able to replicate.
Hand-selected fragments of the Baudelaire children are still with me today. In fact, I think every character I’ve loved imbeds a shard of themselves inside my mind. I like to think all of the pieces adhere together, crafting one massive stained-glass window.
I wrote my first book at seven years old for a project in my first-grade class. Having a year of Snicket and Funke under my belt, I assumed all the other kids were intent to write an adventure.
Something along the vein of finding a penguin in your backyard and helping them return home. You’re happy when they’re reunited with their mom, but their home isn’t a place you can stay, and you have to learn how to say goodbye.
Alas, I was the only one.
If you talk to my mother, she swears up and down she knew then, on that day. She knew then this was what I was going to do. And by God, she was going to nurture it.
There wasn’t a month we didn’t go to the library at least twice. I came home with stacks and stacks of books. I had to get my own card because she didn’t have enough room on her own! All of it — every series, every book, every page, every line — led me to higher education.
Everyone warned me, “If you go for an English major, by the end of it, you’ll hate reading and you’ll hate writing.”
But it’s impossible to hate something capable of carrying me this far. I’m so happy to be here, knowing they were wrong. I graduated with a major in English Literature and a minor in Creative Writing. I thought for a long while I would pursue an MFA in Creative Poetry Writing. But the July after graduation, I started The Last Paradise.
It was initially just a fun project, but it quickly built into something I can no longer quell, and the characters have imbedded themselves on a new stained glass window I never thought I would make. For this window isn’t for other characters in other books.
This window is for mine.
The Last Paradise explores the nuances of home. It questions the ways we’ll change ourselves to fit in places we don’t belong. It addresses what it means to miss something you feel was never yours and the privilege it is to leave when everyone insists you stay exactly where you are.
a biblically-accurate portrait of me