Category: Essays

I realized I wanted to be a storyteller in math class.

...I continue to have a literary camaraderie with these artists and appreciate their influence on my writing and life. I hope my writing has the same effect and has the strength to endure.

I have long been drawn to literature that explores the pressures on women and girls to conform to narrow gender norms. To name a few: Sula, Anna Karenina, Annie John, The Woman Warrior, and, more recently, Outlawed by Anna North. I used to be a Southern belle, and now I'm a feminist from hell, but either way, I pay for being female. So do Sula, Anna, Annie, and Maxine.

In truth, I was a timid child, submerged in judgment and unrealistic expectations. I tottered and swayed, shaped by the whims of others. I envied these characters their abilities to take up space.

I traversed the pages of book after book, seeking comfort in their nooks. Eventually, I placed my own pen to paper and reclaimed control over my narrative.

...: I devoured fantasy novels as a teenager, high and low, Tolkien and Le Guin and McCaffrey and Mercedes Lackey and trashy Piers Anthony, and then I discovered even trashier historical romance novels and gobbled them down like Little Debbie snack cakes. This was tempered in turn by a diet of Literature (such as a marathon of E.M. Forster’s novels after falling in love with the Merchant Ivory production of A Room With a View)...

While studying wildlife biology at the University of Georgia, my required reading consisted of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, and a wide array of scientific journals. And yet I found myself more interested in Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Kafka, and Dickens. Yes, even David Copperfield was more thrilling than sorting through statistical analysis of the visual spectrum of white-tailed deer.