So it goes...

It occurred to me that for all the mention of my writing and my book, I've never disclosed much about what Dirty Shirt: A Boundary Waters Memoir  is about, or how it came to be. I know I've addressed the process and lamented about my struggles with it, but I've never really prepared an elevator talk outlining what the book is about. Part of me just assumed that from the title, people could figure it out for themselves. Another part of me thought that I should keep it secret, or to myself, so that the book would be somehow more engaging or self-revealing to people when they read it. Neither of these are good assumptions to make from a marketing standpoint. People don't get interested by "mystique". So, I'll try and talk a little about the book without giving it all away. The book actually was never intended to be a book at all, I'll start with that. In 2005, I enrolled in a class called Writing from Your Life. It was a class offered through the City...

I've been actively writing since about the fourth grade. Of course, it has been an on again/off again affair over my lifetime, but if I had to pin down when I first realized my love for writing, it would have to be in fourth grade. It was then that I wrote some stories that were not even required for class. I did them just because I enjoyed creating them. Each of the stories were written on 1/2 sheets of paper which were then cut in 2 and put together like a short book. I still have the stories, Mom saved them over the years, and there are some common themes to them, namely disaster, some sort of resolution to the disaster and a moral to the story. I remember a nun teacher of mine asked if she could put one or more of the stories in a special box for the class and I really wasn't keen on the idea. (Author's rights at a young age, I guess.) She got the drift and backed off, but it was really kind of cool to be acknowledged for something I just thought was fun. Through high...