LEARNED to write from a janitor when I was eleven years old. He was thirty-something with an eyebrow ring and he coached the junior high boys’ basketball team. He had bright blond hair that fell over his ears in waves and he was tall, so tall that you could see him above the heads of students and teachers as he pushed a mop bucket of sudsy water through the halls at the end of a school day. His name was Bob.

I had a best friend named Lindsay and by the time we were in sixth grade at that small Catholic school where Bob worked, in a quiet lower-middle class neighborhood outside Buffalo, we had become restless. We took to making up stories and inventing exotic characters who lived in big cities and played in rock bands. We wrote about things we had no idea of: suicides, drug abuse, gay sex, anything that broke the mold of our daily morning prayers and afternoon bus rides. We walked around the neighborhood after school and told these stories out loud, turning around every so often to make sure that the invisible gaggle of our characters was still trailing along behind us. We began to use the blank pages at the backs of our school notebooks to keep track of them all. Their names, ages, hair colors, relationships and hobbies, and a brief synopsis of the lives we’d given them:

“Sully, 25. Green eyes, long dark dreadlocks. Lost his baby daughter in a flood and now lives in a cabin at the top of a hill in the woods because he’s afraid of the rain.”

One day after school Lindsay and I sat in the empty cafeteria whispering and scheming over our notebooks when Bob came in with the pusher broom that looked like a giant cloth caterpillar. He stopped and leaned on the broomstick when he saw us there.

“Are you girls writing?” he asked.

“Sort of.”

That was all he needed to hear.

Besides being a janitor and a basketball coach, Bob was also a poet, a frequent contributor to national magazines and an active member of the local writing scene. When he caught us planning ways to torture and subsequently redeem our list of characters that day in the cafeteria, he was working on his first collection of poems, to be published later that year.

Bob took us under his wing, giving us copies of his newest poems on sheets of computer paper. They were flowing rhythmic pulses of spoken art that I didn’t always understand but loved nonetheless. He gave us each a notebook, spiral bound with a rainbow peace sign on the thin cardboard cover, to be used for writing only. Stories should have a place of their own, Bob said, not crammed into the back of a notebook filled with math problems or history definitions.

But even those empty notebooks didn’t last long. All we did was write, during class or silent reading time, scribbling away at our desks, pausing to chew the end of a pen while our classmates stared, glazed over, out the windows, or studied diligently and put their heads down when they were finished. 

During each lunch period Lindsay and I traded off notebooks and see what each other’s characters had gotten up to. When each story was finished we handed them off to Bob, who quickly returned them with pages of red-inked suggestions and praise.

“Explain this further—why such hostility between father and son?”, or “love the description of the summer house on the lake—you truly are a poet!”

He spoke of us to writer friends of his, sometimes sharing our stories after we gave him our flushed and flattered permission, and later that year, when he gave us our own copies of his collection of poems, we found our names included in the short list of acknowledgements:

“To Erin and Lindsay, my prolific proteges.”

E STAYED in touch with Bob after moving on to high school, trading pages through the mail in stuffed manila envelopes. He edited and released two collections of poetry from writers from all over the city, including two pieces of mine in each. By the time the second volume came out I was in college in Boston, studying music and devoting all my time to playing, listening and songwriting. I began to study CD lyric sleeves as though they were books, digging through the rhymes and imagery to find stories. I kept a journal of essays chronicling my new life in a new city, meticulously keeping track of everything I saw and everyone I met. I felt the stories swirling around my head like autumn leaves caught in a cyclone wind and, after I’d practiced my scales and arpeggios, I hurried to my notebook to get the details down on paper.

These short essays, which I referred to as “narratives”—and would later realize were flash pieces that blended fiction and reality– ultimately led to my first novel, and my subsequent changing of direction.

In Boston I had entered a life I was truly in love with, in a city where it was easy to become enamored. I wrote about what I saw, who I met and where I went. For a girl who had lived in the same small house for eighteen years, the inspiration was endless. At the same time, removed from my family, I began to reflect on their story, and to see where it fit and clashed with my new one. Writing became a dance—an entire routine of an experience I’d had in the city with the last few steps and turns synching back with my parents and brothers, the lives that were continuing as I broke out in this young new waltz. I began to see how the stories ran together and how they served each other in making a movement, a bigger picture, a novel. After four years and countless flash narrative essays later, I begin to think of these pieces as scenes. I vaguely harbored the thought of someday piecing them together to tell this story—mental illness, home foreclosure, the separation and devastation of a family of artists. But I was still in the throes of music, and I soon graduated from the school of my dreams and moved to New York City to work at a recording studio.

In New York, isolated, the day-to-day became tougher and the flash essays became darker. While working unpaid at the studio I got a full time job in retail and struggled to find purpose. After a while I stopped writing and even stopped listening to music. There were a few months where I felt worse than I’d ever felt, where I was scared of everything and I was unbearably lonely. Things became so bad that I considered throwing myself over the edge of the subway tracks in front of an oncoming train. As I stood there, looking down at that pulsing third rail I tried to imagine the fall. I tried to feel the drop and the hit, but I couldn’t come up with it. So the train came and I got on, went back to my apartment and decided to write about it. I wrote it through someone else, a character, to see if it helped me feel the fall. But I never got through it. I realized it was boring and self-pitying and that I should try to write something else instead. Something that really mattered to me. What really mattered?

I closed my laptop, got out a notebook and pen and wrote Rooms of the House on the first page.

T WASN'T that writing was always fun. I went back and dug up the most painful memories in the record of my struggling family, dredging up ghosts and admitting my own regrets. When it was over, it was something like a purge. A painfully real novel that lies bare like a wound. Ninety thousand words later I had a novel manuscript.

But it’s interesting—once the real part was out of the way, once the final draft was saved and I decided to move on to the next thing, I let myself breathe. I let my mind wander. I allowed myself to step outside the excruciating realm of realism and try for a bit of the fantastic.

Since leaving Brooklyn for New Jersey and then finally for Nashville, I have worked as a hostess, a barista, and a recording engineer. I’ve worked in kitchens and grocery stores, in offices and malls. I’ve had ten different zip codes in nine years. I have taken a lot of buses, a lot of trains, and a lot of notes. When the real becomes too much, which it often does, I’ve learned how to cope. I write stories about fake bodies hanging from cliffs, embroidered faces on pillowcases, and cityscapes made from shopping carts. I have gotten the dirt of reality out of the way, on the page, and now I write for something more. While it’s true that everything has pieces of life in it—for how could it not?—I am no longer bound to write only about what I can see in front of me. I am not limited to only doing what my college diploma says I can. I am limited by nothing.

Now, as I begin the first year of my Masters of Fine Arts in fiction at the new college of my dreams, I feel purpose reconciling with the long battle I fought against it. After taking miles of winding, crooked paths, I see my story laid out in front of me. After years of wandering, I have finally allowed myself to hear what  Bob the janitor told that eleven-year-old girl. I remember once, when he handed back one of the notebooks I gave him to be filled with his remarks and suggestions, I saw that he had written something in bold red letters on the blank inside cover, a testimony I am finally ready to heed: “YOU ARE A WRITER.”