i used to think being a writer made me weird.

my college roommate would find me, a glass of red and scratchy Ella on the stereo, laying flat on the floor writing poetry with crayons.  my very first short story from grade school was about a secret land where all of the lost pencils lived.   i've spent entire afternoons planning out the first thing i'll say to Flannery O' Connor, when i sidle up alongside her in heaven some day.

but the older i get, i'm learning that words aren't just playthings to me - they are the only way i know to make sense of this big Story we're all living in. 

once i sat on the floor in a hotel bathroom on the eve of my wedding 

trying to find the right words to vow 

to the closest thing to George-Bailey-for-real that i'd ever known.

once i birthed a baby -- a tiny, mewling thing -- and found 

every cliche i'd ever heard about motherhood 

to be at once true and completely insufficient.  
and in his ear i whispered words.

once my soul-friend lost a babe long-awaited to a vile disease,

and i woke that next morning with the taste of grief, bitter and metallic, in my mouth.

and words.

and i realized that writing is how i learn what it means to be human in this world.  i write to teach myself the true things that i stumble over as i'm looking for a pretty word.  i write because the words that end up on the page - pretty or no - sound an awful lot like the real me, and i offer that glimpse of the real me - the real now - to my children (someday) and to the folks who stop here to check in with us.


i invite you here, to this space where i scratch things down, and i hope amidst my flailing you see both His grace and the need to tell your own story, somewhere, to someone.


don't believe me?  listen to dear annie:

the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive.   anything that you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. you open your safe and find ashes.

--annie dillard