from a Reflection: "My Writing Biography"

I was born in Bangladesh and spent my early years living on a rural compound with Dutch, British, and American doctors and nurses near a leprosy and tuberculosis hospital.  My mother filled our long, hot days with simple yet exotic activities, like walks through the tea plantation (where we watched the elephants logging); but more importantly, she filled our lives with singing and books, in the evening read by candlelight as the geckos chorused from the walls.

When I was six, we moved to Wheaton, Illinois, where my sister and I rolled snowballs down neat sidewalks to school.  Fast forward through two more moves and I am standing on a hill in the midst of coffee bushes on the red, packed-earth track in my new school just outside of Nairobi, Kenya. 

I didn’t live in the U.S. again until college.  Much to my surprise, twenty years later (after a half-dozen or more moves) I am living in the U.S. still, with three daughters, a husband, and a psychotic little white dog.  If I walk down the street I can see the Olympic Mountains rising great and snowy on the horizon; down the hill, the Puget Sound lies glassy and blue.  Other things are less of a surprise--I always knew I wanted to be a writer; I always knew I wanted to have children.  Of course those two things have taken me places, physically and emotionally, that I never dreamed.

Like most writers and parents who are also nomads on this earth, I find my writing springs up as the result of three sensations: sheer wonder, displacement, and gratitude. 

I feel the great weight of my parents’ legacy.  Their work still takes them to the poorest and most desperate places around the world, places like Somalia and Sudan.  And yet here I am in a rather sleepy town, pounding away on my laptop next to a woodstove.  Who am I as a writer and parent in this world?  What legacy can I leave my three daughters, (now 6, 9, and 13 years old)? 

Some years ago in the midst of the most hectic time in my adult life, when my children were all young and at home and my house was full of their noise and the happy cacophony of a very engaged community, I read Miss Rumphius by Barbara Coony to my eldest daughter.   It tells the story of a woman who as a child has been charged by her beloved grandfather to “do the most important thing of all:” find a way to share beauty with the world. She travels to exotic places and returns home to the upper east coast, where she grows weak and old.  But in the spring she walks the paths beside her home, scattering lupine seeds.  Soon the coast ruffles and dances with velvet blossoms.  The last illustration shows Miss Rumphius, surrounded by children, telling them tales of her journeys.

I wanted to shake Miss Rumphius’ hand and feel her press tiny, hard lupine seeds into my own palm.  “Go scatter them,” she’d tell me, and I would.  And I do, or at least I try.

After teaching high school English for two years, I stayed home to write and care for my first-born daughter.  During that time I wrote and published stories, essays, and poems in national and international literary journals.  After the births of two more daughters I was delighted to be awarded a PA award for fiction, which let me pay for childcare so I could write uninterrupted two mornings a week.  I enjoyed a stint as a weekly newspaper columnist; this job gave me the privilege of gathering stories from dozens of fascinating people in the coal-mining county where we lived for seven years while my husband taught Creative Writing (I also adducted a couple Creative Writing classes there).  In recent years, I’ve been working on stories for elementary school children, six of which that have been published or will be published in the internationally-distributed Ladybug and Spider Magazines.  My youngest daughter entered school full-time, enabling me to work harder on several books.

I find myself full of sheer wonder at this diverse, beautiful world; I find myself shaken with the compassion that comes from personal displacement (and becoming a parent is indeed an experience of profound displacement); and I find myself writing out of gratitude for all of it.  Beauty, of course, does not mean that my writing bobs around on sun-kissed waves of sentimentality.  Beauty calls a writer and a parent and a person to engage with the darkest, most forgotten things and people and to find a way of portraying all with scrupulous honesty and integrity.

For a while I felt that seeing my work published would be enough for me, but it is not.  I feel my writing calls me in a very physical and spiritual way outside of the quiet spaces of myself into the world.  As I write, I engage with my characters, setting, and with an assumed audience.  But I also feel most fulfilled as a writer when I am sharing stories and words with others, especially with children.  That is why I am always engaged at elementary schools, whether I am reading a good book to kids, conducting a workshop, tutoring, or penning a letter to a young writer.  I believe that writers are called to live and work in the midst of their own families, communities, and world, and it is this ideal that I continue to muddle toward with every word I write.