why i write

I spent a lot of my Ohio childhood trying to live in a different world. My family loved me, and I had a good life — I just always wanted to be someplace else. When I was young, this involved communing with the fairies I drew in pastel chalk on a blackboard in my room. As I got older, I escaped into books that took me to better, more beautiful worlds.

In 1968, I left home to attend Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. That was a different world: hippies and perfect New York women with long, straight hair, and almost everyone with more education and money than I had. Antioch helped students explore real-life job situations to see if their career choice was a good fit. I thought I wanted to study psychology. I soon learned better.

My first co-op quarter was in Boston, a wonderful place; I worked in the regressed chronic ward of Metropolitan State Hospital, a frightening place. This was where you went if you struggled with mental illness and had no resources. Some of the women in my ward had been placed there during the Depression and World War II; their diagnoses were typed on index cards that sat in a box in the nurses’ office. Almost every card read “paranoid schizophrenic.” The patients wandered the halls in shapeless cotton dresses, or sat in chairs and rocked, or strode up and down the ward, flinging arms out wildly, crying out against it all.

One or two semi-lucid women dragged mops and buckets around to clean up after their less continent sisters, while the paid workers who were supposed to do that fought their own battles. They faced a certain kind of deprivation too.

This is what happens to you if you’re poor, I told myself. This is what it looks like to lose yourself.

After Boston, I didn’t know what I wanted to study, but I did know I wanted to travel. I dropped out of Antioch the following year and used my co-op savings to fly to England. From there, I hitchhiked to Greece and took buses to Afghanistan, where I stayed for several strangely idyllic months. On through Pakistan (tea with water buffalo milk! fluffy chapatis!) to India, where I drew a deep breath and felt like I’d come home. There’s a book in that.

I returned to the States in 1972, but my heart and mind keep traveling. That’s what I write about, and that’s why I’m here.