“You wrote yourself home,” my friend Laraine Herring said after I told her I was moving back to the Chicago area. Laraine’s been my first reader since we were in grad school together more than 20 years ago. She knows my work and what it’s doing better than I do, myself. “You wrote yourself home,” she said, and the truth of this clanged inside my ribcage like a gong.

I hadn’t realized how much I’d longed to return to Chicago—the place of my birth, the place I grew up, the place I hadn't lived since I left for college in 1986—until I pulled two decades worth of essays into a collection, Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss. The introduction and the first two essays of the book are steeped in Lake Michigan, the body of water that defined my childhood. The final essay of the collection features the lake as well, giving the book a full circle I ended up traveling myself. Life imitating art.

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. As shy and quiet and small as I could be in the world, my interior world was enormous, and I took great comfort and refuge in the lake and sky beneath my skin. We moved a few towns north when I was 13, about a mile inland, and my interior world shrank. Perhaps it would have shrank anyway as I hit puberty and developed chronic illness and became trapped in loops of self-consciousness, but the loss of that view and the loss of that internal expansiveness feel connected to me. The lake was my Eden, my paradise, the site of my innocence.

I’d imagined I'd move back to Chicago after college, but found out I was pregnant my final semester, and stayed in California to have the baby with my boyfriend who became my first husband. Years later, when I realized I'd lived in California longer than I’d lived in Illinois, it rattled me—as much as I loved my life in California, I remained a Chicagoan at heart. My internal landscape was still oriented toward the lake: Lake Michigan was East, and even though I developed new internal compasses—the San Bernardino Mountains became North inside my chest—I could still feel that original East in my body. It remained my truest lodestar.

In 2015, when my current husband and I were trying to figure out where we’d move once my one year visiting writer position ended in Lake Tahoe, I applied to a PhD program in Chicago, a tentative step toward return. I got on the waiting list there, but wasn’t ultimately offered a spot, and without something pulling us to the Windy City—something more concrete than my inchoate yearning, that is—it made sense to stay in Lake Tahoe, where my husband had found a good job, where the college had invited me to stay. Plus we’d grown to love the area, the deep blue lake. It felt good to live near fresh water again--it wasn’t my lake, but it became our lake, and I loved taking in its expanse, loved how it felt on my skin.

Seven years later, I pulled my essays together, and there was Lake Michigan, again and again and again on the page.

“My favorite collections by far were the shells and rocks and sea glass I’d gather on the shore of Lake Michigan across the street from my apartment. Gifts the beach would offer up as my feet sank into wet sand, eyes trained for glint and whorl.”

“Lake Michigan undulating across the street in the dusk, a pewter gray mirror.”

“I learn the boulders that line the shore of Lake Michigan, boulders I spent hours scrambling over, smelling their cool mineral breath, their texture embedding itself into my palms and knees, are called riprap, are there to slow erosion. Riprap feels like too silly a name, too close to riffraff, to the trip trap of goats on an ogre’s bridge. These stones are majestic, the vertebrae of a giant serpent hugging the edge of the lake. The backbone of my life.”

“I happened upon a photo of Lake Michigan recently on social media and thought, ‘That’s where my ashes are scattered,’ as if I’d already been burned down to dust, been tossed into the beloved waters of my childhood.”

The lake was flashing from the page like a beacon. A beckoning I could feel in my gut.

“…here there is no place/that does not see you,” Ranier Maria Rilke writes at the end of his poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Our own writing can see us, can help us see ourselves, can draw a clear map that points where we need to go. Rilke ends the poem with “You must change your life,” and I felt that call in the way my book circled back to the lake, a call that felt so impractical, so unlikely, I didn't even let myself speak it out loud. Then my husband turned to me and asked, out of the blue, “Do you want to move to Chicago?” The company he works for had decided to open a Chicago office.

“Really?" I asked. It felt too perfect to be true.

“Really," he said, and there was no turning back.

Of course I don't believe compiling my essay collection influenced my husband’s work situation. As much as I can veer toward magical thinking, I know our writing doesn't have that kind of power. Still, I love how my work had brought us to Tahoe, which brought him to his job, which brought us to the Chicago area, where my own work was internally pulling me. Organizing my essay collection opened doors within me that were easy to walk through when the opportunity arose.

I asked writer friends whether their writing had opened doors to change in their own lives. L.L Kirchner, author of Blissful Thinking, told me “What began as a story about how meditation saved me turned into the realization that, through my practice, I'd become hypervigilant, focused on getting to the bottom of what was wrong with me. As I wrote, it became clear—that was a never-ending well. If I wanted to make progress, I had to start looking for what was right.”

Heather Kirn Lanier said “When I first tried to write about my first baby’s birth, I realized that something was off. She was incredibly small, and we didn’t know why. Doctors and nurses were not just perplexed but judgmental and accusing. Once home, I wrote about their weird treatment in the hospital, but I also realized that, if what I was writing were a work of fiction, it would feel incomplete. A reader would still need to know why the baby was so small. I realized I needed more answers, and I changed doctors for her and we then got a diagnosis for a rare, life-changing syndrome. It was sitting down to write about the birth, postpartum, that made me realize we needed answers.” This journey ultimately also led to Kirn’s memoir, Raising a Rare Girl.

Joan Didion famously said “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” I love how writing can illuminate our past, our present, our truest path forward.

After we arrived at our new house, the first thing I wanted to do was walk down to the lake. We had chosen a house that wasn’t far from the water, a house that doesn't have the view of my childhood apartment, but is close enough to the lake to hear it at night, to feel it in the air. Our back yard has a gate that leads to a ravine that leads to a small stretch of public beach. The sun was setting as we made our way down the wooded trail, mindful of the thirty foot drop into the ravine to our left. “Are those fireflies?” my husband asked and then I saw them, too, little lights flaring in the dusk like fairies, a touch of magic as the waves grew louder. We ventured down some wobbly stone steps, and there it was: the expanse of Lake Michigan, vast and heaving, tipped pink with sunset. The place I had been dreaming of, writing about, longing for. The place where I began. The place where I want my ashes scattered. There it was, opening its spacious arms, cracking space open within me. Welcoming me and my writing back home.

Writing Myself Home

In Defense of Badness

City as Oracle: On Craft and Transit