I’m Different and I Like it…But then again, aren’t we all?

I started writing when I was a kid. We moved to Florida from Virginia, and I wrote about some of the new, odd things I saw, like a lizard and palm trees. I seemed to have an imagination, too. At age eight, I wrote a story about finding a dinosaur in my uncle’s barn. He and everyone else in my family got quite a kick out of that. There was also a story about a talking horse that warned its owner about a man she was going to marry. I set up chapters, but never finished it.

Poetry was my outlet for venting through adolescence. I never showed most of those poems to anyone, until my friend asked to read one of my poems to her class as an assignment. She said it made one girl cry, and that’s…