Why, and Welcome

This is my first website as an author, a portfolio of my history with published words. It began as a practicality. A book of mine is being published, Code Like a Girl; it is my 7th or so, depending on how one counts. I began creating this site from my own code. After all, I've been studying code these past few years, learning the art and skill of being a developer. I can do that. And yet, as I began to code the first draft of this site, I wasn't happy. For this project I wanted a digital home that was already set up, where I could easily wheel in my furniture and books. I was ready to tell my story as a writer, and particularly, as a writer of non-fiction. This split--must I code my own site now that I can--is a metaphor common to creatives, I think.  Many of us parallel several careers, always wiggling between what one does for passion, because one must, and what one does in the householder years, keeping family and home afloat, nurturing others, also because one must. 


I have a longstanding writers group, Wordspace, and recently we've begun talking about the archive of our work. We talk about coming into middle age as writers, and in particular, as female writers. Many of us have taken care of family, worked hard to support ourselves, have raised our own children or been involved with the raising of other's kids, we have embodied and felt so much of the range of life's details and desires, often wondering where our writing lives fit. And so it goes that years pass, decades even, filled with worries and wonders about how we keep everything going: the creative, the financial, the emotional. Then,  the realization, that yes, all these years later, we have. Not with the glamour that comes for a few, and not with great wealth, but for all of us and in our individual ways: enough. 


It is not a given of history that women create public knowledge, that women speak, write, that women publish, hone an art and a craft. In most centuries and still in too many places, women's words are devalued, and certainly not circulated in public. 


Yet, here we are. 


And so this site, an explanation of my authorly self, emerging from the practical and the philosophical both, the story of a journey through a writing life, a journey with others, one certainly not clear at the beginning, or middle, or even yesterday, an exploration of my non-fiction, spanning as it does the academic in my earlier years and the commercial; the study of the ancient world and the immersion in the most contemporary of all things, code. 


To all of you, thanks for being along for the ride.