Rae Meadows

As a child, I wasn’t a big reader and I never imagined myself a writer. In college, kids slept overnight outside the English department to get coveted spots in fiction workshops. I never even considered it. Writing fiction seemed opaque and scary to me. But it was in college that I began to read, really read. There were books that moved me closer to thinking about writing: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes.

In my twenties I floundered. I ran off to Prague. I worked at a seedy hotel in Paris, I sold men’s clothes in Anchorage. In San Francisco I worked in marketing for various clothing companies, unhappy. But all the while I was seriously reading, and one night my boyfriend asked, “If you could be anything what would you be?” Without thinking about it I said, “A writer.”

And that was it. What I had not recognized in myself became clear. I’m grateful to have found my thing—I know not everyone does. I don’t always love to write, but there is nothing in the world like the feeling of having written.

http://raemeadows.com 

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