Next September I will celebrate an anniversary, or perhaps milestone is a better word. Forty years ago that month, I committed myself to writing and to becoming the best writer I could be. To say it has not been easy isn’t helpful or informative, though it is certainly true. I wrote only short stories until branching out in 2013. That represented twenty-eight years, nine of which were barren in terms of publishing.

Writing is finding the intersection between your experience and worldview, the place where one becomes the other. Then writing changes your experience, so the system of influence flows both ways. What you go through determines what you write, and the way you write it lets you see it differently. After a while, you can’t endure something without writing about it later, sometimes decades later.

Anything a writer writes is a personal record, a private archeology of obsessions, revelations, joys, failures.  My early stories are all about my alter-ego, Nina, a thirty-something married woman struggling with depression. Nina spends a lot of time trying to figure herself out. She didn’t get very far, because I abandoned her and began writing, as my mother put it, about my “crazy family.” But as quirky as they were, they also failed to hold my interest and I moved on to writing about the town I grew up in, Ithaca, New York, renamed Dunston.

We are formed by place, though not all places hold equal sway. I seldom write about Boulder, though I lived there six years. And I write very little about the Pacific Northwest even after living here for forty-two years. I left Upstate New York at age fourteen, but those were key years, obviously. And the town is easy to remember, because I assume it doesn’t change much, though of course it has.

The Dunston residents I write about most are the Dugans, a large, loud, raucous family, completely different from the one I was born to, which was small, sullen, and miserable. The Dugans have their share of misery, but they pitch in for one another, which my family never did. Everyone in the household I lived in was looking for a way out. The Dugans are trying to hold themselves together individually and as a group. The one I identify with most is Lavinia, the mother of five children, weary wife of Potter, who has a drinking problem which leaves her in charge of just about everything, including providing an income. These facts in no way mirror my own life. Where Lavinia and I overlap is in our cynical outlook and love of being practical. We’re both impatient yet given to sudden displays of affection and generosity.

Forty years is a long time to get words on a page, cross them out, replace them over and over. Many words, many pages. Many failures, some successes. By next September I will have published seventeen books including short story collections, novels, and poetry. I like to think I’ve inspired a handful of writers through mentoring, a sharp editorial eye, and a constant message of persistence.

I say, bring on that milestone! May I pass a few more I retire my keyboard.