My Writing Life: A Writing Bio
The first thing I ever wrote because I wanted to was an essay. I was in 8th grade when I decided to enter a contest for a chance to win a puppy. I wrote to get something I wanted badly: a chance to appear on The Peter Boyle Show, http://www.broadcastpioneers.com/boyle2.html on Saturday mornings and to get a puppy. I needed a puppy. The topic of the essay was, “Why I want to win a dog.” I wrote from my very being, and I won the essay.
I didn’t think about writing again until I finished my undergraduate degree in 1993. (You could say I’m a late bloomer) I wrote a cookbook review column for a small rag in Philadelphia based around the shopping district, The Italian Market, http://www.phillyitalianmarket.com/ called, “To Market.” The column was called, “A Cook and her Books.”
Then I moved to Japan, where I developed writing fever. I took a correspondence course from The London School of Journalism, and before I got through 4 lessons, I was seeing my article, “10 days meditating in serene environment in Thailand,” in the big English language newspaper, The Daily Yomiuri. I wrote “Bali by Bicycle,” for The Alien, a humor magazine for expats.
When I returned to Philly, in January of 1998, I began writing in earnest. I joined an online writing group called, The Internet Writing Workshop, http://www.internetwritingworkshop.org/, and set out to make a living with my writing. After nine months of writing, revising, and submitting queries and articles, I knew I needed a real job. I applied for, and got, a job teaching English. On my first day of school, my op-ed article, “A sole proudly ill-suited for the corporate world,” was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer. That piece was followed by a second, entitled, “The young carry resolve into post-boom Japan.” But my writing resolve faltered under the weight of teaching and taking graduate school courses, and my writing became confined to papers, and finally, my Masters thesis.
Before leaving the workshop, I began writing a memoir. And now that I’m retired, and resuming my writing life, I hope to complete the memoir, and publish my daily writing to my blog.
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