April 12, 2026

I don’t remember a time when I was not telling a story.

Sometimes I wrote it down on a clean sheet of crisp white paper—I still get excited by a sheet of loose leaf, the quiet possibility of it.

Storytelling has always been there.
Before I ever called myself a writer, I was already doing the work.

But I did not begin writing seriously until I moved to Germany.

The winters were cold. My husband was gone. And the silence—steady and unrelenting—seemed to beg me to say something.

So I did. And once I started, I couldn’t stop.

Writing became more than habit.
It became response.
It became survival.

At first, I thought writing was simply putting words on the page.

But I have learned that writing begins long before that.

It begins in listening.

Listening to the story as it forms—sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once.
Listening to the moments that stay with me longer than they should.
Listening to the questions I cannot answer but cannot ignore.

When I sit down to write, I am not always starting something new.
More often, I am returning to something that has already begun inside of me.

The work is to follow it.

To stay with it long enough to see where it is trying to go.
To write past what is easy, past what sounds familiar, until something shifts.But finding my voice was not easy.

My head was filled with the voices of writers I loved—Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, LaVyrle Spencer, Alice Walker.
Their rhythms, their truths, their ways of seeing the world echoed in everything I tried to put on the page.

And for a while, I didn’t know where they ended and I began.

It took time. It took practice. It took learning how to sit in the quiet long enough to hear what was mine to say.

Not louder than them—
but truer than imitation.

Now I understand something I didn’t then:

Writing is not about silencing the voices that shaped you.
It’s about writing long enough to recognize your own among them.

And for me, writing is no longer optional. It is necessary.

I eat. I breathe. I take in water. I find my happy spot. And I write.