How can I know what I think until I see what I say?

-E. M Forster

Every writing workshop begins with an introduction.

Go around the room and introduce yourself to the group.
Please tell us who you are and how you got here.

Fangirl. Cake baker. Hoopla maker. Amateur filmmaker.

Writer.

I was ten when my school principal phoned to tell me I had won first place in the school’s hobby show. It meant a trophy with my name on it! And a sleek red ribbon to glue to my scrapbook.

I was stunned.

A plain black poetry binder had shut down the arts and crafts hobbyists. Theirs were creations to admire. My poems and limericks had won praise at home. This was the real world.

Words mattered, I learned—my words.

Newly confident, I concluded an audience was needed; I began to corral the neighbourhood kids to my backyard to sit on plastic lawn chairs and watch my dramatizations of fairy tales. They were a motley audience; they were there, no doubt, to see if I could get through my lines wearing a giant paper mâché monster head. It had tiny holes, not quite big enough to see through. There are days I’m still wearing that costume piece, but I’ve cut bigger holes since then.

The audience grew a little at summer camp and high school as I explored the stage lights further. My performances were fantastic flops until I played the promiscuous actress Lois Lane and fell in love with the lead actor. The scripts belonged to others. My writing was limited to diaries stuffed with teen rants and angst.

I enrolled in an advanced English class in my final year of high school. Our teacher, Ms. Weppler encouraged us all to muck about in our musings and daydreams. Two classmates and I made a mock documentary about our school in the third term. Nothing about it was homework.

At the top of my final written essay, she scribbled a large pencil A plus and registered in the margins,

You are a natural. A writer!

That bold definition stayed buried somewhere as I went off to university in Montreal to study literature, then film at McGill. Next, I joined campus radio and became the news director. Back in Toronto, I worked part-time in a bookstore before joining a television network as an intern, writer and soon, producer. Television writing honed my love of story, yet I chaffed at ratings and promotional puffery. It took a kick out the door and a decade of writing workshops to push me toward the start line, naked and trembling.

Still, the stony silence on the page was familiar. I was too busy stuffing my days with those other definitions to be still and write. If writers require quiet, what was I doing being so busy with all those things I loved?

Join me, reader friend, as I tend to those early seeds.

Maybe I’ll get lucky. Sexpot Lois Lane lurks yet, threatening a ruckus.

Watch out for sprouts.