I gave a speech at my undergraduate graduation encouraging my classmates to resist the temptation to categorize themselves based on how the world saw them. After deciding to become a journalist, half-filling out applications for American Studies PhDs, and settling on teaching high school English, I’ve come to recognize the paradox implicit in my speech’s message; it isn’t any better to force yourself out of the place where you fit best. My decision to stop worrying about smart people, the job market, society and great talents, grow some agency and finally pull writing out of the insufferable vacuum of multiple meta-narratives of why I shouldn’t  has given me extreme piece-of-mind and singleness of purpose.

Before I calmed down in my junior year of college, I was a philanderer of many pursuits: staying up way too late discussing adolescent notions of philosophy, falling too hard for the thoughts of sweater-wearing neo-bohemians, dabbling with the hearts and minds of many different departments. It was like being split into many different parts and this fissured-thinking confusion was what I thought of as academic. But somewhere in junior year—I can’t remember exactly when or why-- I recognized that I loved writing. I didn’t care if I had to think so hard that the shell around my skull starting hurting or if I stared so long onto the white margins of an unfinished essay that the librarian came onto the intercom to say the library was closing.

I recognized how creative writing and essay writing were about the only things that I could do without staring at the clock or hoping I could take a break to watch Grey’s Anatomy. I preferred having essays to write and stories to submit. Eventually, time wasn’t moving so quickly when I had to make tedious word choice decisions between “ferocious” and “bloodthirsty,” but I learned to recognize that writing is, at its core, work and wasn’t full of inspiration from above. While I undertook a number of projects in my undergraduate studies that were not settled in the literature discipline, I still think that the research methods, independent work, close relations with professors and interdisciplinary approaches made me a better writer today.

It’s interesting to follow the paths of people who want to write. Some were telling tales as little kids; some were loud and some were quiet; some of them knew what they wanted to do and others came to it in a roundabout way. How did you decide that you wanted to become a writer?