I Gave Up Creative Writing for a Decade

It was the best thing I could ever have done

By Anna Rollins

The summer after graduating with my Master’s in English, I made myself a promise: I was going to write.

During my course of study, I’d begun a collection of essays about characters at my Appalachian fundamentalist Christian school and had been told the work had potential. I didn’t know what the collection was about necessarily, but I was determined to figure that out in process. My teaching job did not begin until the fall,...