I end my series “On Becoming a Writer” in North Carolina, where I have lived since leaving New York. I taught only two semesters at Essex County College, because we moved that summer to Boone, where Tom was Associate Pastor at the Boone Methodist Church. With us was our three-week-old daughter, Carol. Talk about a wild year!…
After seven years in South Carolina, I cashed in my small savings, rented a U-Haul and moved my few belongings, including three cats, to New York City. The man I had been dating up and down the Eastern seaboard was a student there, but since I wasn’t ready then to commit to marriage, I rented…
The spring of my last year at the Children’s Home, I drove from Columbia to Chapel Hill to be interviewed as part of the application process for UNC’s School of Social Work. It wasn’t a happy interview and I knew afterwards this program would not be the right place for me. Uncertain what to do next, I…
Following college, I began a Master’s program in English Lit at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. This was shortly after my return from Mexico, which may explain my immediate dissatisfaction with grad school. My experiences in college and San Juan Acozac had been richly interpersonal. My reason for majoring in English had been a…
That first day, walking along the dirt road through the village, I worried I might catch some dread tropical disease and die. We had already settled in where we would live that summer, the six women in a barn, its floor dirt, the one window a large open square without panes or curtains or a screen (we hung…
Well before I graduated from high school, I knew where I would go to college. Because of that, I applied to only one school, a small Methodist liberal arts college in the Appalachian region of Southwest Virginia. My sister had gone there for two years, and the day our family drove her down the long…
Two cities. Two different worlds. From the diversity of my Miami neighborhood see Miami post, I moved at the age of 14 into the rarified air of a Washington, D.C. suburb. Arlington, Virginia at the time had the highest per capita education of any county in the United States. I attended a public high school, which…
To listen to the June 29th interview, go to “Be the Star You Are,” click here and then click on the interview and forward it to 22:30.
I was born in Miami, Florida, and after three years in Georgia, I lived in Miami from the age of four to fourteen. In Miami, I was fortunate to live not in a typical suburb but on a street of single-family homes in the midst of one and two-story duplexes. Our neighbors were young and old,…
I once heard it said that professional comedians have often survived painful childhoods. I don’t know if that applies to writers of fiction but certainly it was true for me. Before I was born, my mother contracted severe rheumatoid arthritis. Until then she had been a vibrant young woman, attractive and athletic, popular among…