Some enchanted evening

I am delighted to be participating in the SheWrites.com Blogger Ball Redux. Thank you for taking the time to peruse the modest beginnings of this very new blog. I am just beginning to make a slow and arduous metamorphosis from private notebook writer to public blogger with an eye for developing stories, essays, and my first novel for eventual publication. This feels like a coming out party! I am truly inspired by the resonant, witty, and powerful voices of so many of the women writers that I have been finding through SheWrites. I am also inspired to realize that so many, like me, have been writing in solitude until entering this community. I feel as though I have found my tribe.

I have been writing all my life. I work full time as an English teacher at a High School in an urban fringe community of East San Diego County. My students are mostly children of poor and immigrant families. Many are children of the system. Some are refugees of war, of gang culture, or broken homes. I struggle to find effective ways to meet their many needs while offering meaningful reading and writing instruction. I also struggle to preserve time to write. My husband stays home with our daughter; he lost his job to a major corporation due to company downsizing while I was pregnant. I am a natural home-maker and he took considerable pride in his management position, so to say that this has been an adjustment for both of us is an extreme understatement. I have learned that as long as I am writing, I can handle anything. So, I write more and more. I seem to do my best work in memoir, but feel uncomfortable at the possibility of publishing those. So I am trying my hand at fiction, and learning a great deal. And, of course, blogging! Thank you for joining me here.