For Most of My Life, I Wrote Alone. But Not Anymore.

My Beyond Q & A, in which I share my best everyday cashmere sweater, sweet serendipities, and, of course, my theory of writing as a metaphor for life

For most of my life, I wrote alone. This was in partly out of necessity—I was a college dropout and a young mom of three small children. I had no time and less money, which made access to writing classes, workshops, and other on-ramps into the literary community feel like nothing but a pipe dream. To further complicate matters, I lived in a small, rural town (population 500!) while my kids were babies. Writing classes and other luxuries were an hour away in the city. And this was in the early 1990s, when the internet was barely a sparkle in our collective eyes.

By the time I moved to Minneapolis around the age of thirty, I was on the precipice of an awful, destructive divorce that catapulted me into a looming financial disaster. As my legal bills mounted, I found myself each and every month scrambling to pay my mortgage. Moonlighting to avoid losing the house my children lived in—all while holding down the very first full-time, out-of-the-house job I’d ever had as a mom. In my basement…