"I just thought you'd like to know I can read. You got anything needs readin' I can do it . . . "

When people learn that I ended my public school teaching career to write full time, they sometimes ask me what I write. I often feel like paraphrasing Dill  -- you got anything needs writin', I can do it!

My earliest memory of trying to establish myself as an author comes from about fourth grade. I'd read Little Women and identified with Jo. I even set up a kind of study in our attic, an unheated, partially finished low-ceilinged space that had a dormer window. I retreated there after my mother, who'd found me hunched over paper and pencil in a corner of the dining room, said to my father in a voice dripping with derision, "She's writing a story."

In high school I turned to poetry, page after page of free verse about how nobody understood me and I wanted a boyfriend. Mostly I imitated the scatter-splash style of E. E. Cummings because it looked easy. I did write one genuine sonnet, a tribute to Jacqueline Kennedy. It was called "Lady in Black," and it praised her courage in that terrible November of my junior year.

In college I discovered other big guns of the art -- Wordsworth and Yeats and William Carlos Williams and Mighty Emily Dickinson. The more I learned about poetry the more I believed I couldn't write it well. And by that time I had a boyfriend who understood me, so it seemed I had nothing left to say.

By the end of my college days I had abandoned creative writing for what Peter Elbow calls "writing by committee" -- academic research papers, student evaluations, purchase order justifications. I kept a personal journal only irregularly, usually abandoning it because what I was writing was not honest and I didn't have the emotional freedom to write authentically.

A combination of factors came together in the late eighties to push me back into writing. I became a mother and entered mid-life (both at the same time). The computer revolution swept through my profession, and I learned how to use a word processor. In 1992 I went back to school to learn enough about the 19th century to write historical fiction about the summer of 1885 in Berks County, Pennsylvania. And I started making the rounds of summer writers' conferences and workshops.

I like to say that I'm published in three genres. A nonfiction piece I wrote about a local 19th century newspaper magnate was the cover story of a historical society review. Some of my poems have appeared in small local journals.

My only published fiction is a story I sent to my junior college literary magazine in 1990 when there was a call for alumni contributions to celebrate the school's twenty-fifth anniversary. I was a founding editor of the journal, and the staff member who did most of the work on the anniversary issue was a high school classmate. (That means I think it was my history and not the merits of the piece that got it in.)

These days, obviously, I write a lot of nonfiction -- personal essays, autobiographical pieces, family history notes. Poems are short but take the most in time and craft. Fiction is calling agian, and yesterday's afternoon with Glimmer Train made me get out some old folders filled with notes and stumbling starts. Tomorrow I teach all day, but Friday? Friday will be for fiction.