Kevin Catalano
Writing for me is not so much a choice as it is a necessity. Ask my wife, who knows too well when I’ve missed my morning writing schedule, and I’m short-tempered, moody, a misery. Being a person who, for whatever reason, has never been an adequate oral communicator of his emotions, who is as dumb to himself as a dog trying to be self-reflective, I need writing to expunge demons. (If you read my stuff, you’ll know that I have a whole bunch of slimy, egg-smelling demons.) Luckily — very luckily — I came to writing early in my life, which, I’m convinced, is why I’m not a psychopath serving a life sentence for god-knows-what. Many writers say they came to writing through their love of reading; I wasn’t a big reader, because 1) if I had time to read, I’d rather spend it writing, and 2) whenever I’d read, I’d want to rewrite the story to make it go where I thought it should. Instead, beginning sometime in second grade, I’d kneel hunched-over my bed filling spiral notebooks with dark, twisted stories of a murderer loose on a runaway train or a group of kids who summoned Bloody Mary and can’t escape her wrath. Friends would knock on the door, inviting me to join a pickup game of football or basketball, but I’d rather be alone with my notebook and pen.
Flash forward thirty years, and nothing much has changed, except that the notebook is a cheap Chromebook, and I’ve figured out, to an extent, how to balance writing with family time. That I’ve managed to publish my writing along the way is a blessing, but it pales in comparison to being a productive, somewhat-normal and mostly-happy member of society.