I didn’t start out as a writer. I wasn’t that kid who dreams of holding her own novel one day. I was a voracious reader, though, and I loved being around young people, so I found my way into a career as a teacher. I thrived on those moments when one of my students discovered […]
I can’t explain why I write. I won’t try to be eloquent or clever about my compulsion to do what I do. I’ve simply always had the indefinable impulse to put my thoughts, feelings, and impressions on paper, from the time I could pick up a crayon. Maybe I inherited writing genes from my maternal […]
When I was young, our Scottish council estate was worst in the winter months. The lack of sunlight, just a few hours a day, meant that days were short, and night time was always a worry because of the sectarian violence that would break out at odd times, between people you hadn’t even known didn’t […]
The first scribblings I wrote felt like breaking bread for a new religion. I wrote drunk on Mildred D. Taylor, Rosa Guy, Roald Dahl, S.E Hinton. I wrote poems about the time I went missing in a Lagos amusement park as a kid, then like a small miracle turned up unscathed, puzzled by all the […]
I guess, the seed of writing was first planted in my mind in reverie whilst lying on my back staring at the different shapes that clouds formed of their own accord, at my father’s coffee farm in rural Kenya. I wanted to capture my life from the clouds and shout to the world about it. […]
The Baby-Sitters Club, Sweet Valley High, and Famous Five opened up new worlds to me – worlds I could actually be part of, and exist in, at the same time as the physical one I knew. At 14, I was burning through books accessible to me like wildfire, much to the disadvantage of my academic […]
I knew three things about myself when I was growing up. I never wanted to get married, I didn’t want to have children, and I always wanted to live out of a suitcase. I took two years off from college to travel in Europe. The whole time I was wondering how I was going to […]
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