My block was made, not born. My girlhood was voratiously chronicaled. My family moved around twice before I went to highschool, but it happened that around the time that I was learning how to write, we moved as a family out of state for the first time. It was my mother that suggested I keep in touch with my elementary friends through letter writing. As time went on the other kids lost interest in writing, and when the letters stopped coming back to me as quickly as I could send them, I began to adopt pen pals sometimes 3 at a time in various parts of the world: South Africa, Yugoslavia, New Jersey. Every letter I kept. After I would write my letters, I would fold them for their passage (in the appropriate-envelope-folding manner I had learned in school), and I would feel a bit sad because a piece of me was gone and never to be seen again. And so, I began journaling and writing poems as well, to keep some of my offspring around to see and to touch and to go back and visit sometimes. I had a lot of time on my hands, I guess you could say... By highschool, I believed that my journals were not a safe place for me to write. Even though my mother had on more than one occassion told me her sacrad girlhood journals had being pried upon by her mother, I knew she was just as likely to do the same. We had a passive agressive relationship: She permitted me to leave the house one day a week outside of school, and I spent every minute of all other days with the door closed in my room mostly writing poems or journals or letters to long distance boyfriends in an act of defiance. Unfortunately, I wasn't locked in the house because my family enjoyed my company too much, but rather my mother, suffering from severe depression preferred to lock the world out. I was devestated, and angry, and powerless. (It is very painful for me to remember this now. It has greatly shaped my outlook on life and parenting in such a significant way.) Some journals were written in a secret code that probably I couldn't crack to this day. They still sit in a closet in my parents suburban house somewhere I think. Dozens of them. Unreadable. Untranslatable. My young adult self insisting to never ever be understood, or cared for, or comforted even by my future nurturning self. So writing for me began as a way to cope with friendships separated by distance, and a youth that suffered at the hands of my mothers depression. At that time, the internet didn't exist to expand your world, your knowledge, your mind. You could spend time with a stack of encyclopedias and write letters to people in far away politically turbulant countries and just desperately try to make your world bigger than it was. That's all I could think to do: Write.