Rebecca and her grandfather

Packs and stacks of paper, lined or unlined, tablets and spiral notebooks, pencils, pens, markers, and notecards always made me happy; buying them, stacking them, using them, just looking at them.

For Christmas one year, I got a typewriter! I was about nine, and I suppose it was actually called a toy typewriter, but it worked and I could roll paper around the black roller and the keys actually click-clacked and voila! Words appeared, and besides my beloved dolls, never did I love a present more.

As I got older, I wrote in diaries and wrote poems to my family and friends. I often cut pictures from magazines that I thought went well with each poem, and pasted them in. My grandfather gave me his old manual typewriter, and I used that for many years to come. In high school, I wrote stories and poems for our literary journal. In college, I wrote a newsletter for my dorm.

At Indiana University, I only wanted to take classes that revoled around writing or art: Creative Writing, Song Writing, Art, and Art History. I did take a course called Anthropology and that came pretty close to my passion for writing. Of course, it involves human nature so it wove itself into a writer's life easily enough.