Leslie Lawrence

I've always loved reading and been delighted by words. I've always had lots of ideas and feelings I wanted to express. But because almost all writers I read in school were men, I imagined I would find my calling as a muse. Then I read Virginia Woolf. Fascinated by the dance of consciousness, Woolf wrote in a way that felt distinctively female. Her women characters didn't fight in wars or slay bears, but quietly, while they chopped onions or mixed paints, their minds took extraordinary journeys. Reading Woolf under a pear tree in a London suburb during my junior year abroad, I decided I didn't want to be a muse: I wanted to write.

And write I did, throughout my master’s program in teaching. After two years of teaching in a public high school, I'd earned enough to take a year off. First I lived in a hand-built commune of sorts in Vermont, where I wrote on my bed (before laptops) in a tiny loft I climbed two ladders to get to. Before winter set in, I travelled to Guatemala, where I put money down on a one-room writing studio/house still under construction. But the next day, a massive earthquake forced me to scrap my plan of writing there.

Later, as a student in one of the country's first low-residency M.F.A. programs, I combined the solo, sedentary life of a writer with the social, physical life of a waitress. Discovering the stories of Grace Paley, I learned I could find strength and authenticity in my cultural heritage. Paley also taught me that even when writing fiction, I must always strive to tell the "truth"—not the truth I already knew, but the truth I didn't yet know that I knew.

How lucky I feel to have been able to spend so many years writing, reading, and teaching what I love. Fortunately, too, I’ve had time left over for my other loves: slow travel, improvisational dancing, photography, and leisurely conversation. Only now do I realize that all these pleasures do what writing does: lead me away from myself and then back home.