How long have you been interested in writing?
When I was about seven years old some friends of my parents gave me a diary. Almost every day I wrote something down in it, even if it only said, “Forgot what I did.” From that point on I wrote a new diary every year up until the age of about nineteen years old. During my junior and high school years I was always writing short stories and poetry and giving them to my teachers to read. Nearly all of them encouraged me and would stay after school to give me moral support and helping me with my grammar and spelling.
Tell me about your family history.
I was born in England back in the 1950’s. My parents met each other during World War 2 when my Dad was stationed in England. After the war my mother came to the United States and my parents got married in a small, enthusiastic, Pentecostal church in 1948. Mother was twenty-one at the time. She remained in the United States a year but got tired of living in her mother-in-law’s house. My Dad did not have enough money to support her any other way. So she saved up for what was supposed to be a short visit back to her family in England, then refused to return to the United States. My Dad was so in love with her that he went to England and remained there for nine years, living with my mother in her mother’s small flat (apartment). I was born during those years, then my sister, then my brother. Then in 1959, my Dad got a letter telling him that his mother was dying of cancer. He returned to the United States right away. But it still took two more years and the threat of divorce before my mother was willing to return to the United States with my brother, sister, and myself.
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