About the Writer
I’ve always written, but I’ve never felt comfortable calling myself a writer. I’m cool with being a writing student, even a writing teacher. I’ve been a professional copywriter since 2013, but writing about offshore welding and towed sonar arrays and feline obesity doesn’t feel like Capital W Platonic Form Serious Real Writer Writing, if you know what I mean.
I’ve written some poems, a few novels, a couple of short stories. You won’t have heard of any of them unless you know me personally because I’m a shy writer, though I’m working on my reluctance to share. My creative writing is one of the few areas in life where I have any humility whatsoever.* That’s because writers have always been a Big Deal to me. As a kid, they held near demi-god status in my mental categorization of types of people in the world. I, a regular type of person, could never be a Real Writer, even if I did spend a gonzo journalist’s or barfly poet’s worth of my twenties in dive bars in New Orleans.
I’ve begun to suspect, however, that there are no regular types of people, so I’m as likely to be a writer as anyone else. On this website, I’m going to be writing a little more. Mostly about writing. Go figure.
*Seriously. Ask me about my homemade buttermilk biscuits or my talent for thrift store picking or my ability to sniff out trouble. No modesty at all.
I still feel a little funny saying it, but it’s true. I’m a writer. I wrote my first story “Mr. Dog and the Mean Monsters” at the tender age of five. I assigned myself short reports on the animal kingdom in grade school during the summer. I wrote the requisite number of angst-ridden Gen X poems about conformity and the ozone layer during high school. I wasted my twenties in New Orleans bars, which counts for something. I taught writing to middle schoolers and high schoolers in my thirties, and in my forties, people pay me to write about their businesses. And like any Serious Writer®, I’m diligently toiling away at a novel. My current creative project is a weird tale I’m affectionately calling Queen Hag.
