The Word Alchemist
At age five, when the nuns at St. Anthony's school gave me the key to unlock the magic of words, I started scribbling and I've never stopped. I've used whatever I could find when I have the fever to write - torn pieces of copybook paper, the backs of envelopes and my mother's grocery lists, the margins of old newspapers and magazines. I've always been enthralled by stories and the alchemy of authors's language - whether printed, spoken or heard. My Dad was a poet and my Mom a constant correspondent, so I figure I come by this love of language honestly. Words are powerful vehicles for human emotions, for forgiveness, inspiration and best of all, learning. The family joke is that I keep having to buy new computers with ever-larger hard drives, to store the ever-growing assemblage of what I've written over the last many decades. As I write, so do I read - voraciously. Cookbooks, knitting books, how-tos - even soup cans, in a pinch (the French and the English!), but usually I consume novels that have a plot twist or engaging characters, with stories that are funny, clever or make me go, "hmmm" or "oh no" when I get to the last page.
