Discovering I Was Not a Poet: Letting Your Purpose Find You

By Deborah Saki

From the time I was six or seven years old, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I would bind sheets of paper together, scribble short stories and lines of poetry, and proudly finish each with an “About the Author” page. In my collection, I wrote: “Deborah Saki is a writer and poet. She has been writing since she was six.”

Even though I wrote both stories and poems, what I really wanted to write was poetry. I kept the lines of other poets close to me, memorizing verses, recit...