hal jes joe

Biographyabout

 

as soon as i could hold a pencil, i was writing.  the stories are piled in the attic of my childhood home: guinea pigs with the power to transport people to other dimensions, unicorns who sit at tables working out the taxes, fairies that can turn into lions.  and then there are the stories i didn’t write down, but that just seemed to leap from me.  i told my kindergarten teacher i had three poodles who survived open heart surgery.  i told my best friend i had a pair of ruby slippers in my closet.  i told my mom that i couldn’t see: told the optometrist that a picture of a man on a horse was a birthday cake.  i wanted rainbow colored glasses.

my fictional worlds slipped into the background while i moved to high school and swabbed drinking fountains and sniffed nutrient agar, spent evenings with my father looking for the splendor in calculus: the curving beauty of a limit approaching infinity, and then put my last year of college on hold to spend a year and a half in russia seeing a stranger in the mirror and trying to teach people about god and english and other things.  but i kept writing and writing, writing and writing, trying to arrange order out of the chaos.  faced with a world faceted in terror and beauty, i realized i didn’t want to discover and record imaginary places.

gary saul morson wrote, “what if important events are not the great ones, but the infinitely numerous and apparently inconsequential ordinary ones?”  

exactly.  this life is important enough, necessary enough, to be observed.  so welcome to squeeze the universe: my little place in the cosmos where i let you know what’s happening next door or down the street or out your window.  because it matters.

as for my credentials, i started writing schmoozy love-sick poetry in junior high. [i published my first poem in dog fancy.]  once i made it to college, i pretended to everyone, including myself, that i was going into microbiology.  but if you dig out those old graph paper notebooks you’ll see poems about chemistry and stoichiometry and mendel’s peas covering the margins.  in the end, i graduated with a degree in english and a minor in microbiology.  i went on to get a masters in english with an emphasis in creative writing [specifically, creative nonfiction].  i currently work as a writing tutor, but i’ve taught freshman composition and technical writing.  i’ve edited math textbooks and grants for high altitude hypoxia.  i’ve written and designed websites.  i’ve filed and hole-punched and stickered.  i’ve hand-stamped and cut fabric and worked on remediation kits for y2k.  i’ve done all kinds of things, but i’ve always been writing in the margins.