This is (primarily) the story of my life, but through the filter of my bibliophilia. (For a story of my life through ghostly visitations, food, sex, alcohol, or my children, Google me (or go to the Publications tab). For a story of how I began studying writing and the brain, read the introduction to the book, “Teaching Writing Through Journaling.”

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I was born in Pittsburgh, PA, the third child and first daughter to my parents, Jerry and Joanne Volk. My father loves to claim that I was born talking. My mother loved to tell the story of how much she wanted a daughter after two sons, and how lovely it was to wake up and have her daughter brought to her on a sunny Palm Sunday. I like my mother’s story better.

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When I was in about 4th grade, I had a severe case of walking pneumonia and was homebound for more than a month. During that time, my mother bought me book after book after book. I read all of the Five Little Pepper series, The Borrowers, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Little Women, and at least half of the Nancy Drew series. I see that period as the beginning of my never-ending love of books.

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I was such a nerd that, at one point, in about 6th grade, I created my own library cards for my books, complete with plot synopses, a numbering system, etc. My class did a Polly Anna for the holidays, and I put down my preferred gift as a bound notebook and a package of classic blue Bic’s—still a favorite pen choice. My crush picked my name, and I was humiliated when he handed me the package.  The other kids were opening cassette tapes and nail polish sets and Bonne Bell Lip smackers and card games. My girlfriends had rolled their eyes at my request. My crush chose a black faux leather journal and the requested Bic’s. When I opened the package he whispered, “I like to write, too.” I was thrilled on oh so many levels.

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I grew up in this strange pocket of the South Hills of Pittsburgh—a tiny neighborhood called Lincoln Place, somehow classified as part of the city of Pittsburgh even though we were surrounded by other towns with their own school districts. This meant the Bookmobile, part of the Free Library system, came to the local A&P parking lot on Saturday mornings.  I read every YA book and every classic novel they carried. The librarians loved me, of course,
and would bring five or six new books for just me, which they selected each week.

 

This weird neighborhood meant a 20-minute bus ride to high school, which meant more of sense of displacement for me, but I found my niche; I found other would-be writers and love-to-read’ers, and in my junior year, we developed a literary magazine for my high school.    

 

In those teen years, I would lay on the pink shag rug in the bedroom I shared with my sister and play “Greetings from Asbury Park” over and over and over again, letting images of Wild Billy and Sandy and all of the others play out in
my mind. I would moan longer than Bruce did at the end of “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” waiting and waiting for someone to pick me up off that rug, waiting to be spirited away in a Chevy, in any car that went fast enough to get
me out of those Pittsburgh valleys and hills and to the Jersey shore, where I was quite sure I belonged.

 

A local radio station recently did a 100 top Bruce songs countdown, and I listened to most of it. By the top ten—the final ten they played--I was reduced to lying on my bed, quietly crying in a sort of delicious pain, still mostly singing
along, often throwing a fist in the air, but thinking a lot about the little girl laying on her pink shag rug in Pittsburgh. I still love story, I still love bad boys, I still love Chevy’s and the beaches of Jersey. I am including my love of Springsteen here because his lyrics most definitely began my love of storytelling and poetry and the miracle that can happen when they join up.

 

Sometimes I have dreams where I meet him, backstage. They are the type of dream where it all feels normal, but the thing is he always already knows my name, tells me how happy he is to meet me.  In the very last one, he sang a
few lines from a song he’s working on. I try to make these dreams come to me, of course, but I can’t. They arrive when I’m not suspecting, like surprise gifts.

 

One September, I got to meet him when he was on his book tour. This was not an item on a bucket list, because I never imagined I could actually have his arm around me, hold his hand, have him really and truly look me in the
eye. His handlers were giving everyone about 30 seconds with him and still, I blurted out something I’m choosing not to repeat—no, it was not “I love you” though it could have been—it was about writing, and he held onto my hand
and said, “Wait, what? Tell me.” His handlers had to literally pull me out of his hands. Somehow, I managed to make it to a café two blocks away; I walked in and burst into tears, and the lovely waitresses perfectly understood my
situation, led me to a booth, brought me red wine and mushroom soup, and cooed and stroked me like I had been through something. I had.

 

When I was a high-school senior, my boyfriend was a freshman at West Virginia University. My thoughts had been Penn State, in order to follow my big brother. I visited my boyfriend for a weekend—we had a terrible, dramatic
scene at a freshman dance party because I would not fuck him in the laundry room—something he assured me all college-aged kids do. I walked out and wandered around the campus with only the vaguest idea of where I was and
attempted to find the only other student I knew there. It was Halloween weekend, so the parties were out of control, the kids on the street were in costume, toilet paper and cotton spider webs hung from the trees, all adding up to a surreal night. Just when I was beginning to panic about where I would sleep, how I would ever find the bus station the next day, I literally bumped into the person I needed; a girl a year older than me from our high school. She took me to a series of house parties, and I woke up in an easy chair, my face smeared with blue make-up I had never applied.

 

So, to quote Steely Dan, “the weekend at the college didn’t turn out like I (you) planned,” but I fell in love with West Virginia University and ended up going to college there. And what did I do my first week on campus? I found the literary magazine and joined up.

 

I hate to fast forward through my college years here, but I must. I planned on only talking about the reader/writer part of me, but other stories keep poking in: I don’t need to tell you about the WVU football games and the aching
mountains and moonshine parties and pick up blue-grass bands and cow pie football and the owners of the clothing store where I worked sometimes taking so much pity on me —or being embarrassed by me (I could never be

sure)—walking me around the shop and saying, “Here, wear this. Here, try these on,” exchanging my moccasins with flapping soles for Frye boots, making me cry with gratitude in the dressing room, pulling on the Levi's and chamois shirts I had folded (and fondled) in the store. So, I won’t tell you those stories, but I will just ask you to imagine how it felt to be cradled by those mountains, at that age, that point of my life, and feel so tiny and so full of possibility at the same time.  

 

In college I met the man who became my husband, and moved with him to Southern New Jersey. After growing up in Pittsburgh then going to West Virginia, New Jersey seemed as flat as the western plains. The sudden weather changes were so odd to me, too, as was what I then perceived as the constant sunny skies. (Pittsburgh has a higher annual rainfall than Seattle. In valleys like Morgantown and Pittsburgh, when rain comes…it stays.)

 

I was lost in S. Jersey, at first. I used to tell my husband that driving on Rt. 70 made me feel like I was in a cartoon—like Fred Flintstone running with the same background moving behind him again and again. I felt better in Philadelphia; at least there were numbered streets, a grid, tall buildings to help me get a context for my bearings, like the hillsides of Pittsburgh and West Virginia.

 

I was married at 21 but felt unfinished, to say the least. My decision to go to graduate school was like a coin toss: I would apply for a graduate assistantship and if I got it, I would get my master’s degree. If I didn’t, I would get a job doing who knows what. I was interviewed on my birthday, which I hoped meant good luck, and it did—I got the assistantship.

 

On my very first day in graduate classes, I looked around the room and saw that I was the youngest by about 10 years—Rutgers-Camden attracts commuters and a non-traditional student body. I was not deterred. I sat taller in my seat and thought, “Bring it on.” The class was “Publishing and Editing.” The instructor jumped right into a discussion of outside editorial projects each student would be doing. He went around the room and asked students to introduce their projects; I was the only one who came to class without one. He suggested I help edit a Civil War diary he knew someone needed help with. I wanted to run from the room, screaming, but I merely nodded and tried not to cry. He saw my reaction and suggested I speak with Lisa Zeidner, head of the Creative Writing program, and see if she could help me. She did.

 

I started my work at the Painted Bride Quarterly that week. I will never forget sitting in Lou Camp’s Queen’s Village living room, drinking red wine and discussing poetry.  I was desperate to work with writers who were alive and writing right now. PBQ’s editors had decided to start looking for grad students at schools in the area. Call it serendipity, or magic, or fucking luck; I was so grateful.

 

I felt adult and hip and very honored discussing the work of authors of all different levels, having a say in whether or not we would publish them. The editors respected my novice opinions and, when the semester was over, they asked me to stay. I began my work with PBQ which has now comprised more than half of my entire life.

 

I’ve shared co-editorship with Marion Wrenn for the past umpty-ump years. We were editorial nomads, holding meetings around kitchen tables, at pizza places, coffee shops, in bars. We aligned ourselves with Rutgers-Camden and ran the magazine from there.

 

But, life has this way of happening and happening, and I am about to synopsize 13 years of my entire life in 3 sentences: I got pregnant the month I earned my graduate degree. I had two more kids in six more years. When my children were 13, 11 and 5, my husband passed away after a nine-month battle with a cancer that was not supposed to kill him. I was with him until the very end, kicking the legs of the hospital bed at the end; yelling “No, no, no,
no,” as I held his hand and then, I felt him let go.

 

That first year after his death I was still teaching at Rutgers, running PBQ, taking care of my kids, trying. Early that next spring I felt like I kind of woke up, looked around, and realized my personal life had changed so much I needed to change my professional life as well. I realized that no matter how old I got, the folks at Rutgers were always going to perceive me as the girl I was when I first came there.

 

I remembered that Drexel University had housed Boulevard, a long-running literary magazine, and I knew it was no longer there.  I felt I had nothing to lose, and I threw an e-mail like a Hail Mary pass to poet Miriam Kotzin, the only name I knew on the faculty list. Twenty years later, I am still here.

 

I thought I was meant to write fiction, but essays have been where I’ve found my niche. I had several big “hits” in Salon, and a few in the New York Times, as well as a column in Philadelphia magazine for a few years. “Oprah” was a big one for me—I love to think that Oprah read and chose my essay herself, but Modern Love may have been my holy grail. (For a complete list w/ links when possible, click here.)

 

There have been other men, my kids have grown into very cool young adults, I’ve had my heart broken, and I’ve experienced joy that has taken my breath away. Life keeps happening, and I’m so grateful that I’m grateful. I read and I write and I read and I write.

 

I don’t know if I could even have imagined that I would have the good fortune to still do what I wanted to do since the 4 th grade—be surrounded by books, writing in all its forms, and people who love it as much as I do. I have these
out-of-body images of myself—ensconced in the center of my parents’ bed surrounded by books, or the photo of me the editor of an internal Drexel magazine insisted on taking—me in a bathtub filled with pages and pages of
text. (See below—yikes!)

 

If someone could have just told that 6 th grade girl when she opened up the package of Bic pens that she would have what she wanted…

 

I am still growing up. I still read while I walk and have stubbed toes, twisted ankles, and disgruntled strangers to prove it. Though I still love leather-bound journals and Bic pens, like many of us, I do some of my writing on keyboards. I feel too young to have lost my mother, and know I was too young to have lost my husband, but overall, I feel grateful for the life I have. This life with the written word at its center, allowing me to meet fabulous new people,
and even more importantly, connect with them in meaningful ways. Everything will be alright because I’m still doing what I’ve loved to do since I was 10-years old.