For many years, I was a dormant writer. Like lava, ideas boiled in me with no release. And as we know, dormant volcanos don’t sleep forever.

The first evidence that writing was bubbling inside me was the envelope my grandmother carried in her purse. My mother had typed both her address in Michigan and our return address in Minnesota on it. Inside, in my blocky handwriting, was a poem about rabbits. I had never actually seen a rabbit in real life, but my little kid self imagined I knew enough. My grandmother left school after 8th grade; writing anything was beyond her imagination. What I did seemed like magic to her. She carried the envelope and poem with her until she died. 

I went to college where I majored in journalism and edited the campus newspaper. It became official: I could write. Non-fiction, anyway. I could report. And I liked doing it. The precision and the distance of journalism felt safe. I cranked out copy, then began writing for small local papers after graduation where I sat through city council meetings and whacked out detailed accounts of zoning regulations and the ensuing arguments. 

It was pretty fun.

Then, in my early 20s, I moved to Alaska. Once here, there were times writing, real writing, felt a physical necessity. A trapped sneeze, if you will. Like when I left Shishmaref after my student teaching and the six-seater airplane I was in burst through the low clouds insulating the island into a sky so blue and vast my back teeth ached from the sweetness. Or halfway through the nine-hour drive between Fairbanks and Seward when I’d crest Broad Pass, just south of Denali, where the sweeping panorama would lead you to the highest peak in North America. Or riding on the back of a four-wheeler in the dark along the edge of Lake Iliamna before taking a steam bath with other women from the village, the soft sounds of Yup’ik words floating in the wind, when I knew there was nothing more in the world than that moment I was in.

I’d open a notebook, eager, ready, to tell a story, and watch the moment slip away. I’d stare at the page, and my heart would drum out only one beat of defeat: what can you possibly say that no one else ever has? What stories could I tell that were true but not dull? Real but not reporting. Until my daughter was born, my only answer was “not much.”

I like to say that having her in my 30s led me to my own voice. For a while, I thought that meant that her birth story was so epic I had no choice but to share it. (It was, and if you’d like to read it, subscribe to this website for exclusive access to the story. It’s a doozy, if you like small planes, big storms, and touching the edges between life and death.)

But what was bubbling up was perspective. I saw the distance between unique and universal as something worth writing about. So I sat down and did it. Not that it was easy, but it was worth it. The birth story landed me a spot as a columnist in my local newspaper, The Juneau Empire, which I wrote for a number of years. It was a shift; I wasn’t reporting. I was telling real stories, mostly about being a parent, but also about figuring out the shape of my own space in the world.

After about a year, a woman came up to me at the recycling center where I was sorting all my stinky cardboard and glass to tell me she recognized me from the picture that accompanied my column. And she said that what I wrote spoke to her. I didn’t know how to respond, partially because I was filthy from the muddy parking lot, but also because I felt exposed, open, in a way I never had before.

To know my words mattered to someone I'd never met before, someone also sorting their trash in the rain, and that what I’d said mattered enough for her to say something? Well, that was a whole new level. I sharpened my senses and wrote more.

Soon after, while stuck at the Seattle airport, I bought a book to bide the time. The author was describing her happiness project, and in it, she mentioned National Novel Writing Month. It stuck in my craw; I’d never written fiction, not so much as a single short story. But could I do that? An idea crept in, born of the moments I hadn’t written about all those years. I still owned those stories, even if I hadn’t told them earlier. My perspective shifted like a fault line, allowing the stories to boil to the surface. That November, through NaNoWriMo, I discovered an abiding love of writing fiction. 

Writing fiction has brought me closer to writing the truth than any reporting ever could. It’s easy to squelch our voices, thinking what we want to say won’t really matter to anyone. But that’s wrong. Anytime we tell the truth by telling the stories that live in us, we create the things that are most important in the world: community, shared experience, understanding, connection.

The shifting plates and perspectives made it clear my voice can mean something in the world. Can make someone lonely feel seen. Can make someone laugh or gasp or cry or whatever. That the act of writing can make another person more themselves and more alive.

Now my daughter is 21, and she’s off having her own breathtaking moments, and I am creating a new understanding of what adventure means in my 50s, still here on the edge of the wilderness. This is what I write about now, how getting older is a new coming of age story, one I’m writing with a lot more tools than I had as a young person. More aches and pains, more bruises and scars, sure, but also more forgiveness, insight, and patience.

I hope you’ll join in the stories I’m ready to tell.