Meet the Authors – Avery

Avery

I wrote my first book when I was seven. “Book” meaning story – a ten-page story about a goose and a golden egg, my own take on one of Aesop’s fables I had grown to love as a child. In the basement of my home in St. Louis, Missouri, whenever snow prevented my sister and I from playing outdoors, we read Aesop. Or Shel Silverstein, or Hans Christian Andersen.

These outlets of pure creation and organic cultivation of thoughts have attracted me to writing ever since I was young, though until recently I just considered it a fun pastime, unaware of the remarkable impact it has had on my 17 years of life. With an extra thirty minutes of free time before bed, I’d write. Three full journals and two full diaries sit on my bookshelf, abundant with scribbles stemming from my anger, cursive inspired from my excitement, and neat print when everything was just fine. Not to mention the file of unfinished word documents and completed short stories I have on my computer.

When I couldn’t speak to people, I spoke to my paper, and it never replied, but it listened, and it understood. Throughout the seven moves I have experienced in my lifetime, writing had kept me sane – it was always a refuge for me to turn to.

To be honest, this blog wasn’t my idea. Quite frankly, I have never considered my writing to be something that I want to share with people; I thought that my words and characters created by me should reside permanently in my head and nobody else’s.

But then I got to thinking. Why not share a piece of myself to the world? I’m a relatively private person – I don’t post frequently on social media and I only tell secrets to a close circle of my most trustworthy friends – but I realize now that I want people to hear what I have to say.

Sometimes I’m going to write about issues I have deep passions for. I might decide to inform you about why I loathe climate change, or about my desire to achieve equality across all spectrums, or about my path to picking a presidential candidate. Other times, my posts will carry little weight in terms of seriousness. You might learn about my quirky obsessions, or about my inherent love for aesthetics, or about why I can’t listen to rap music, even if my life depended on it (that might be a slight exaggeration). I think it’s fascinating, a little nerve-wracking, and exciting that I won’t be the only one reading what I write anymore.

If I could go back and tell my seven-year-old self something, I would tell her to keep doing what she’s been doing, because she never thwarted her passion for words or felt insecure about the sentences being strung together on the pages of her countless notebooks. She did what she enjoyed, and look at where it has brought her now.

So, with that, welcome!