I began writing my first year of High School. It was a mechanism for me. I needed something immovable to get me through those years, and the pen and paper were cheaper and more easily accessible than most drugs, psychedelic or otherwise. My junior year I met Jennifer Carlson, an English teacher who brought out the fiction writer in me. My first story was marred with grammatical errors and logical impossibilities, but my first writing teacher saw through it all and managed to dose me with some magical sense of literary invulnerability that kept me writing daily.

That all came to a heaving halt with college writing workshops. Writing by committee- now there’s a bastardization of the form if i have ever encountered one. My professors weren’t professors at all, but grad students so fresh out of college that you could still trace the sleep lines under their eyes. And my peers, mostly ECON or POLY-SCI majors with credit deficiencies, were far too concerned with character to give a writer like me any substantial critiques. But sometimes all it takes is one, one good workshop, one lovely muse, one single tiny molecular earth-shattering piece of advice.

I became a writer, not by profession but by psychological tendency and emotional necessity. Now, a little over a year out of college, I'm trying to turn some of these tendencies into a tidy little career.

And a year out of college I can say this with no considerable negative impact on my ego: I'm selling out the first chance I get.