For the next several Sundays, I’d like to introduce you to writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, meet Kathy Collins, an amazing flash nonfiction writer from the west coast. (This is her second publication!)
Where there is smoke there is fire. As a kid, I devoured my brother’s Cub Scout magazine, Boys’ Life. The mystery of flashing a fire with a spark from two sticks. It was beyond my ten-year-old ability to understand. It was magical.
I read everything. My if I had gone missing would have included these details: freckled nose lost in a book, spare book grasped in other hand. I diligently listed every book I read on lined notebook paper. My young life was enhanced by wrinkles in time, a little Prince and that silly old bear. With my ten-year old tears, I watered where the red fern grew. I lived in the little house on the prairie and captured the castle. I went through the door in the wall and into the secret garden. One summer I solved 56 mysteries with Nancy.
My brother could build his little boy world out of Lincoln Logs. He would dump them out of the cylinder container. The two-inch wooden logs would notch together at right angles to create little buildings. Hours and hours later a compound of green roofed forts popped up on the beige carpet prairie. I was excluded from the world he built. Construction of my world happened in my brain and was cobbled sentence by sentence, page by page, chapter by chapter. Construction lights flashed Morse coded stories again and again waiting for release. I journaled the angst of being a brunette with braces in a blonde Wisconsin world. I wrote a story for my ninth grade English class. It was a glorious middle age love story. In my mind middle age was 40. I knew nothing of love. My characters had a housekeeper and a Picasso. I have no memory of how this story was conceived. The rural High School English teacher gave me public recognition.
I didn’t write again until college. I wrote a story about the end of my first romance. Well received by my teacher. The next year I took a creative writing class. The professor disclosed that A’s were not part of his grading arsenal. I have no recollection of what I wrote but still cherish the A+ grade.
The life that followed college was stressful. In retrospect unauthentic. I wrote the things that needed to be written. The rhythms of life. Love notes, Thank You notes and obituaries. Weekly letters home in a pre-email world. I ghost wrote speeches and letters and resumes. I wrote dating profiles for friends seeking soulmates. Memos, Regulatory filings, and employee reviews at work. I wrote my own divorce.
An old friend sent me a packet of poems. They were written by me during my second serious romance. I had no memory, but it flashed a flicker and I wrote a poem about surviving breast cancer. I submitted it to poetry contest for survivors. I won and my poem was published. My heartbeat accelerated fueled by the music of joy.
Two years ago, 1,788.9 miles from home on Halloween Eve a seemingly random encounter altered my life. I could have turned left but I went right. I opened a door and entered a book sale. I stopped at Christi’s table and we chatted about books and writing. She gave me a packet of writing prompts. Something flared within me – soul kindling that sparked a dormant fire. I signed up for a class and kept signing up, as the fire illuminated the stories patiently waiting a very long time to be told. I wrote of joy and despair floating on a sea of resilience. My heart’s inhabitants. Birth and death. Surviving and letting go.
It turns out I always was a writer. I just forgot.
Kathy Collins lives in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her neighborhood sits on the cusp of the desert nestled in a ring of mountains. This beauty is the price she pays for extreme summer heat. She started writing three years ago after escaping from three plus decades of a telecommunications career. She has lots of stories to unravel. She is married, a mother of one, and Nana to two. Her favorite memories are woven from travel and a life filled with love and laughter.
In the late hours of the night while my husband, my son, and my daughter all sleep, I sit illuminated by the glow of a computer screen and type away, pour words into a document that marks my first real attempt at story: a novel about a young woman who is grieving the loss of her mother, searching for her in the waters of Lake Michigan, in the faces of strangers.
In between work hours and dinner and the folding of clothes, after tucking my daughter and my son into bed—though both kids, one a teenager and the other almost, are beyond tucking-in…let’s call it herding them into bed—after all that, I write. In journals. On screen. In countless spiral notebooks.
I took a boxing class once. I learned the art of the jab, the uppercut, the hook. I even sparred with a guy, but he just played nice. It could have been the giddy grin on my face or the clumsy footwork, but I’m guessing he knew I didn’t pack much of a punch. If he’d really fought me, though, or knocked me out, would I have gotten back in the ring to face him again? Maybe. If I really loved boxing. But I’m a softy (and a sore loser), and I eventually quit.