I’m not that interesting.

For the twelve years I’ve called myself a writer, this has been my refrain, along with is this the final draft or the final FINAL draft? and I got rejected yet again, time to call Dominos for cheesy bread.

I’m a cis white gal who grew up in a farm town, moved to the big city for college and basically never left. I hold down a corporate 9-to-5 job, which keeps my lights on when writing doesn’t. I have never been addicted to heroin. I am the opposite of “not like other girls”—I am other girls.

I would never offer a patient a poem about their leukemia. But sometimes I write them. 

Acute Leuk

His cells crumpled blue

tissue paper collisions

bring about the end

Up at 2, up at 3, up at 5. The dog, now a senior, has been most playful in the darkest hours of the night. Nipping at your hand like she is a puppy again. At 5:30, 5:45, 6, at 6:30 a long walk. The sunrise today looks like plastic. Shades of pink and purple like a 90s ToysRUs.

As an essayist, it’s my job to take experiences from real life and write about them. And oftentimes, these experiences do not take place in a vacuum; they occur with other people. And these people have their own version of events, which may differ slightly from mine. Alas, memory is fungible, reality beget by perception and emotion. 

I am, in literature and in life, inexplicably drawn to the bad narrator. I want Maria in Play it As It Lays, strung out on pills, Ottessa Moshfegh’s anti-heroine spending her family’s money into oblivion, Scott in The Sarah Book, driving drunk with his kids in the backseat. I want Fiona Apple on repeat, going bat shit on the symbols, playing the only sound that has ever accurately captured the angst of being the other woman. 

I grew up across the street from Lake Michigan, and the lake helped raise me, helped form me. I couldn't see the end of it, could only see where it kissed the horizon, and that made me feel spacious inside, made creative possibility feel endless.

“I’m an archivist,”  I proclaim to my partner, as I stop (for the fourth time) to take a picture of a piece of paper in a closed tattoo shop that reads “Sorry, no piercing,” and, later, a piece of graffiti that says “FUCK FUCK FUCK.” As Michel de Certeau affirms, “There is a rhetoric of walking.” The patterns of our movements make a shape we can’t see. 

There’s a pink scar stretching from my lower lip to the bottom of my chin, where a wakeboard carved my face in two in a freak boating accident the summer I was fifteen. It’s faded now, to the point where people who meet me say they never even noticed it until I pointed it out. In the weeks following the accident, bright blue sutures crawled down my face, drawing the gaze of every person who passed me on the street. 

Running eight miles every morning wakes me up, eases my stress level, gives me space to ponder Big Thoughts, keeps my body in shape -- and sometimes also helps me conduct research for my novels.

Let me explain.