I've always been drawn to old beautiful things. I have a particular fondness for old mirrors and chipped painted furniture. I remember sitting in my apartment once before a dinner party, before the guests arrived, looking around and admiring how beautiful everything looked. I was struck by the thought that many of these things had already had long lives and would live on long after I was gone. I was the things passing through.
My first job was in publishing. I had two bosses—one a gay man, the other a lesbian. The gay man groomed me to advance. Making a book deal was, he said, “the part that gives you a hard-on.” I was not so aroused.
I left for a display job, ironing shirts in the basement of a store in Herald Square. That opened the door to a career in high-end fashion, designing window displays and merchandising showrooms from New York to Milan.
Disillusioned by the industry's wastefulness, I took a job as a receptionist at a mannequin company, where everything was handmade, and managed its Brooklyn factory for nearly a decade. When the business folded, I found work as a stylist. When the pandemic hit, I transitioned into internal communications at a nonprofit.
These jobs were all very different. What that had in common was the writer in me: observing what was happening and seeing it in scenes. Like everyone else, my life was a story I was telling myself. Sometimes I feel less like the main character than the narrator, who has an outsider's perspective on the very things that are happening to me.
In criticism, I pay attention to what strikes me. I make note of the sentences that stand out, then try to figure out what strings these impressions together. Invariably, these pieces are as much about me as whatever I’m meant to be writing about.
My personal writing often begins with an image: something someone said, the way they said it. For whatever reason, these things stay with me. I take that persistence seriously. It usually means there's something there for me to discover. My writing helps me see what that is.
