Why I Can't Stop Writing

      I have never not written. From my first forays into fiction as a very young child (my initial three-page “novel” which my mother, God love her, kept, was inspired by the Time Magazine cover story about Nietzsche and was entitles Is God Dead? Needless to say, it remained, at three pages, unfinished.) to my years in high school writing deliberately provocative essays for English class, through my college years as a Semiotics major and on through jobs as a magazine and newspaper journalist, freelance writer, and publicist (to make ends meet) the written word has been both the propelling force of my existence and its bane. There have been times, I admit, when I have wished I could give it up, like cigarettes or alcohol or heroin, because writing has felt very much like an addiction--like an addiction that, should I give it up, would make my life much easier to bear. But in spite of many failures, I have also had much success, although that isn’t the point The point is that I simply can’t not write.
      My life in general is lived as a writer: I see the world through a writer’s eyes, with a writer’s curiosity, with a writer’s sense of wonder and play and desire to translate every day experience into extraordinary prose that then translates back into an experience that everyone can recognize. I am a shameless eavesdropper. My daughter points out, constantly, that I stare mercilessly at people and things. I filch sentences, words, moments, daily—from anyone and anything that moves me, makes me laugh, confuses me, and stuns me. I cadge from anyone who will allow me license, and only in the past few years have I been honest enough to tell those from who I beg, borrow and steal that I am going to use what I have gained.
      For years, my personal writing, i.e., that not for material gain, was written on my personal time: whatever moments I could find in a day that were not devoted to work (even if that work also involved writing). But with the birth of my first child, a son, in 1987 I decided it was time to fish or cut bait. I would stay home, raise him, and write fiction full time. That decision marked the first in a series of huge strides in my writing and huge changes in my life. Within a year I had gotten my first fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and off I went to write for a month, leaving my eighteen-month-old son in the care of his father and his grandmother. Not a year later, my first short story was accepted for publication. In the past twenty years I have also had another child. And I have written more than thirty short stories and five novels, gone through two agents, had hundreds of rejections, dozens of acceptances, ten more fellowships, and seen my work—fiction and non-fiction—appear in literary magazines, magazines, and anthologies. I have just received my first book contract from Seal Press to edit (and write an essay for, as well as the introduction) a collection of essays on the various faces of desire, by fabulous women writers, many of whom, like myself, have been laboring for years, often with limited success, but never giving up.
      Although it remains the largest disappointment of my life that neither of my agents were able to place any of my novels, despite the agents’ huge and welcoming support and lots of hard work on their part, I have seen two of those books short-listed for major prizes and I have a new novel in the works. I remain undaunted in my search for another agent.

      Now as I am fully into my fifth decade I feel more compelled than ever to continue to say what I need to say, what I have to say, what I must say, in the way that I feel that I am uniquely capable of. I assume I shall be taking notes, thinking of stories, working on essays, and sending out manuscripts until the day I die. At least I would hope that to be true.