Looking back

You don't have to look very far to find a magazine article promising to tell you how to become a writer. In my case, however, the route was anything but straight.

Fall in love with reading

I started reading at the age of four or five. I spent much of those years sitting on the kitchen floor, slowly sounding out the words in my pink-covered reading book. Nearby, my mother would be washing the dishes. Whenever I came across a word I didn’t understand, I would do my best to pronounce it and my mother would tell me what it meant. Even at that age, I knew reading was a key to worlds I might otherwise never visit. If I could just figure out the secret, I would get in.

Be a bookworm

As a child growing up in Fairbanks, Alaska, I spent most of my time reading. I was particularly drawn toward pathetic stories about poor, fatherless families who enjoyed making each other Christmas gifts out of nothing more than bits of used string. I read Little Women in the overhead cab of my father’s camper, read Daddy Longlegs in the bow of my father’s boat, read The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew in our cabin at Harding Lake.

I gulped books whole, choked them down fast, gobbled down one only to swallow another. I checked books out of the George C. Thomas Memorial Library, bringing them home a bicycle basketful at a time. The library was housed in a log building down by the Chena River, a matronly, broad-hipped building that wore its front porch like a skirt. Inside, way in back, on the other side of the adult section, was a small set of stairs that led to a tiny landing where the children’s books were kept. It was up there while all alone, kneeling before the bookshelves that I made my choices, my coarse hair almost brushing the tin ceiling.

Be curious.

When I left home to go to college at the age of seventeen, I had only two goals, to become a medical technologist and get an apartment. My worst fear was I would die with other cities being nothing more than dots on a map. I wanted to expose myself to new ideas and cultures and people.

Eventually, I got a job as a med tech, but after several years of drawing, spinning, mixing, pouring and pipetting by mouth other people's bodily fluids, I woke up one day scared shitless that I was going to spend the rest of my life drawing, spinning, mixing, pouring and pipetting by mouth other people's bodily fluids, when I wasn’t barely paying my rent or bleaching other people’s blood out of my five white uniforms. So I quit.

Have an inexplicable, life-changing moment

Over the years, I delivered mail, took wedding photos and sold (legal) drugs, but nothing seemed to stick, so it isn’t all that surprising that one day while sitting on the floor of my barely furnished, no-bedroom apartment ― a ground-floor studio with a broken toilet and non-functioning TV ― I pulled out the portable Olivetti my parents gave me for leaving home. I’ve been writing between naps ever since.