Biography: A Homemade Persona

I began writing poetry secretly at the age of 16. I was just too embarrassed to show people. One day my mother walked through the front door, and the first thing she said was the following: “That was a beautiful poem. I don’t think I ever wrote such a beautiful poem in my life. She had been writing since she was 14, but she was ‘allowed.’ She was a girl. Freud might say I unconsciously left it for her to find. Regardless, I had been found out, and it was a good thing too. The ice was broken, and I just kept on writing—in those days it was only poetry, and published poems in literary journals. One day, a magazine editor came up to me and requested that I submit a poem to him. Was he talking about me?

I was fortunate in a way to grow up in a modest home. It disabused me of the idea that the life of a starving artist was romantic or interesting. I wrote through college, studied for and received a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Communications. It was when writing my dissertation that I realized that in a way I was really doing the job of a ghostwriter: I WAS MY OWN GHOSTWRITER!

Sure, I wrote the dissertation myself, but I realized that I was doing so under an academic persona. I had to learn the lingo, the culture, and the language of graduate school and academia. The creative ‘me’ took a backseat while the academic me took over. I was a ghostwriter for myself. When I think of the title of my dissertation, I sometimes scratch my head in disbelief. Did I write that?

I went on to teach a range of college English and Communications courses including Shakespeare, Creative Writing, Creative Non-fiction, Argumentation, and Writing for Television, among others. Between preparing for classes and grading essays, I worked as a college textbook editor for McGraw-Hill and Prentice-Hall. And that’s where I really learned about and mastered the concept of style.