Shanna Mallon’s blog, Food Loves Writing, is one of my favorites. She writes with such truth and always makes life into a beautiful story. I’m over there today as part of the Writers Chats series with a guest post about being a writer.
I inherited much of my love of reading and writing from my grandmother. I always remember our summer visits to her house and how, as I fell asleep on the couch in the living room, her bedroom light would remain on, a sliver of yellow underneath her door, as she read through the piles of books on her nightstand. When she died my mother inherited her cedar chest, packed full of family photographs and quilts and old letters. And underneath all of that treasure there were spiral notebooks, filled with stories my grandmother had written that we had never known about.
I have written in a journal almost every night since I was in seventh grade. There is a whole box of them under my bed, and sometimes when I have nightmares about house fires, my books of words are the the things that I am afraid of losing (those, and my piano). And all those years of writing, all those years of collecting stories and memories of joy and anger and sadness have taught me that writing is how I process life.