Tap the gear icon above to manage new release emails.
Follow Mary Ann Noe to get new release emails from Audible and Amazon.
Working with words is in my genes. My grandmother never wrote a simple note; it was always in verse. In response to a request from her son for a loan, she scratched on an envelope, “You have been to me kind and true / So I’ll fork over a five to you.” A generation down the line, my mother kept meticulous trip records. I remember beginning my first short story on a family trip when I was eight or nine. It was one of those Bulwer-Lytton prize-winning gems, starting off something like, “The midnight clock struck in the village. Bong! Bong! B—“ You get the picture. So much for the Pulitzer Prize in literature.
From there I worked my way into high school poetry, filled with angst and word choice so purple as to be almost fluorescent. Some of it I have since reworked, and, like Kafka, I hope the old stuff is burned. Eventually, experiences I observed or experienced began a persistent knocking on the inside of my brain, and I had to get them down on paper. Writing essays taught me that I could slash and burn; editing didn’t leave scars.
Over the 25 years I spent in the trenches teaching middle school and high school English, I complained about not having enough time to write. However, a few years ago, that persistent, albeit infrequent, knocking from inside my head to write something down became poundings and hollerings. Fortuitously, on an airplane from Los Angeles to Milwaukee, I had packed a yellow legal pad and a pen in my carry-on. By the time we landed, I had sixteen pages of frantic scrawlings.
At the moment, my own story, my writing life, continues to evolve, and I am having fun watching where all this is taking me. I thought I’d somehow “dry up,” but writing seems to be a lot like reading; once you start, the first just makes you thirsty for another, and then another. Now, I continue to write because I am compelled to.
Follow me at www.maryannnoe.com.
Read more
Read less
