The Wild

Writing is my wild. Or should I say—I can explore my wild, honor my wild, and showcase my wild by putting words down on the page. I think sometimes we fear the wild, we fear acting risky, saying something risky, letting it all hang out. But on the page there is nowhere to hide. I mean, you can try and hide, but then the writing ends up being bland, it ends up feeling false. It lacks something. The wild is the truth. I know it when I read it in other's work—it just shimmers on the page with aliveness.

A teacher said this to me the other day: “I just read your story and I thought to myself, okay, this girl is weird.” He went on to say that he meant it as a compliment and believe me, I took it as one! “You come across as a nice girl,” he said, “but I can tell from your story that there is more there, that you’re a little bit screwed up like the rest of us writers.” Yes, that’s what I mean by honoring my wild—all my screwed up pieces are encouraged to fall onto the page. That’s where they can live. I like to embrace the wild in the day to day, too, but secretly I have more fun letting it loose as I’m creating.

So this is my new blog. My temporary digs until I set up a more permanent place. I just finished authoring a blog for Writer’s Digest called MFA Confidential. You can read all the archives here. Basically I talked about what it was like to be a second year student in a Creative Writing MFA program. The blog’s also filled with lots of writing tips and inspirational quotes. Now that I’ve graduated from the program, it’s time to dive into the “real world” of writing. It’s time to take what I’ve learned and apply it. And so here I am. Tapping into my wild. Musing about writing and life. This may also become a place where I talk about my other passions like health & fitness. I’ve worked as a personal trainer for over ten years and this work has really shaped me as a person and a writer. So, we’ll see. We’ll see what this becomes. We’ll see how my writing life takes shape. I hope you’ll join me as a try and figure it all out.

Have a great day, everyone!

“Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe, shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.”
-John Jake