I started out as an elf. I evolved into a tomboy farm girl, part-time cowboy, cornfield explorer and adventurer on our farm in Northern Illinois. My first friends were farm animals-black and white cows in the milk barn, pink-nosed pigs in the pigpen, horses, chickens, and calves in the apple orchard, and family dogs and farm cats.

My hideaway was in the orchard in an old red brick building with a worn wood door, nailed shut. The door had an open space at the top. By climbing up the door and squeezing through the opening, I could jump down, landing in piles of fragrant hay.

I spent hours there with my favorite books, crayons, pencils, and tablets. Stormy always went there to have her kittens, so usually there were kitty friends with me, too. I daydreamed, talked to myself, and I sang loud songs to an imaginary audience. When I left the icehouse in afternoons to join my family, I brought my daydreams and the coziness of my nest with me.       

I was one of those rare creatures who had an idyllic childhood. Then first grade happened. I brought my daydreams with me, stared out the window, doodled on my tablet, wondered why the teacher wouldn't let me take my shoes off, and never had a clue about what I was doing there. Along the way, I somehow learned the three R's, and wrote my first story in second grade, Sam and His Dog (which I still have!).

Mom gave me "grown-up" novels to read when I was about nine. I spent oodles of time in my room buried in a book, eating potato chips and peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. It was water skiing, my dog Muggsy, and enough budding curiosity about romance and handsome, knight-like men/boys that saved me from becoming a hermit at age twelve.

I chose a fat novel from my mother's collection, Dear and Glorious Physician, by Taylor Caldwell. It was the best book I'd ever read, and I became a devoted fan of Caldwell's copious fiction. She became my mentor. She dropped her first name Janet and used her family name Taylor as her moniker as she claimed that women authors were not taken seriously-she definitely had something about her to take seriously.

Caldwell's writing is intelligent, meaty, complicated, sometimes mystical, practical, and well grounded in fact. Her vocabulary is rare, pungent and accurate. I enjoy using a dictionary when I read her books; I learn new and intelligent words, not often used, especially in today's watered-down, fast-forward, let's-get-to-it "literature." Her characters are deep, complex, and imperfect. Presenting true-to-life protagonists with frailties and flaws endeared me to her honest and profound writing of substance.

I wanted to write like she wrote and to live the life of an author of fat, engrossing novels with deep and convoluted characters and edgy and enlightening plots. At a young age, Caldwell set me on a path. Those big, fat novels I aspired to haven't yet appeared on the shelves, but my life has gone the way of the writer and the artist.

There were stops and sidetracks along the way, including starting out my adult life as a young mother at 18. After six years and two kids, I left that marriage, traded in my green Pontiac for a red Kharman Ghia, and headed west. Stuffed the kids in the car along with a few suitcases, pillows, and a scraggly plant, and drove from Missouri to Hollywood. I was twenty-three; my kids 5 and 2. It was the first time I had done anything all on my own. What an adventure!

I stumbled through my life as a single mom, an aspiring stage actor-turned-director, a drama coach, and high school theater arts teacher. There were the wild and crazy demands of raising kids in the middle of Hollywood in the middle of the seventies. It was glamorous and grueling, adventurous and confusing, exhilarating and exhausting. And, when I'd had enough, I bought a house a couple hours outside Los Angeles in the small town of Ojai (pronounced O-Hi, a Chumash word for "the nest"). Aaaah! Back to the country! The kids and I survived those crazy L.A. years. The sanity of a house with a big fenced in yard and swimming pool for the kids and our Lab was a rebirth for us.

All this time, I was never without my journal. It is what kept me sane. It was my friend, companion, therapist, lover, and my comfort during volatile and uncertain times.

I tapped out a few plays on my IBM Selectric, which was fun writing. After directing plays with the task of reading and re-reading the script, maybe twenty times during the rehearsal process, dissecting, analyzing, and crawling inside of the written form of a play, I found the rhythm and the dialogue of the genre. I loved the challenge of telling a story through dialogue and keeping the action in the space of a square box. I wrote numerous short stories, poetry, essays, press releases, and such. Still, it was years before I could call myself a "writer." With only a few pieces published in obscure places, I had never made much money as a writer, so I felt unqualified to say I was one; if I did, I felt like a phony. (Sound familiar?)

All that changed in 1996. Living in St. Augustine, Florida (don't ask how I got there), I completed Julia Cameron's twelve-week course The Artist's Way with a group of about fifteen women. My inspiration landed me in Taos, New Mexico, studying with Natalie Goldberg. I had read her best seller, Writing Down the Bones, in the late eighties and it made my writing make sense. It spoke to the writer in me who couldn't find my way out of the closet. I was deeply affected by Long Quiet Highway where Natalie writes about her Buddhism, her spiritual teacher at the Zen Center in Minneapolis, and how her writing became her spiritual practice. There was resonance for me as I had immersed myself in my own spiritual practice with my spiritual teacher, Sathya Sai Baba, who lives in India. The idea of writing being a spiritual practice infected and inspired me in a new and refreshing way. I felt I'd found my purpose. When I had the opportunity to spend a week in Taos at Natalie's writing retreat, I went!

That experience goes down as one of my life-changing events. I was just ready. Writing practice with Natalie was a dream come true. Something truly profound happened to me there. In a room of about sixty participants, I got up the nerve to volunteer to read aloud a piece I had written earlier in the day. I had never read my writing aloud. As I was reading, I couldn't breathe and I thought I was going to faint. Afterwards, Natalie does something she calls a "recall": the class tosses out phrases from the reading that stuck in their minds. I was amazed at what I heard.

At a break I was walking with a friend toward the dining room. We passed Natalie who was involved in conversation with a couple people. When I passed, she reached out, touched my arm, and said, "That was a great piece, by the way," and went back to her conversation. That comment sizzled through me like a bolt of lightning. Before that moment I had never been able to hear that I was a writer. It just didn't get into my heart, soul, and mind through all the walls I'd been hiding behind. Her words penetrated to my core. I came home and created Writing Naked.

My next retreat with Natalie was the following January. It was snowy and cold. I had expected to regain that high and inspiration from the summer before. Instead, I was met with resistance, struggle, and the big time blues. I shared this with Natalie. Imagine my surprise when I received a personal postcard from her after the retreat, encouraging me!

Not long after that, I sent a piece into The Sun magazine. I got a call from an editor there saying they wanted to print it in their June 1997 publication. What a reward!

Over the years I've filled around seventy volumes of journals, and still counting. Journaling has always been there for me, but in 2001 something happened. My 84-year-old mom was diagnosed with cancer. Mom had never been in a hospital or had any illness. On the other hand, I had a complicated medical history that included serious illnesses off and on through my life (although I have always considered myself healthy-one of those paradoxes). I had plenty of experience with hospitals, doctors, nurses, surgeries, medical technicians, tests, medications, and red tape, and had acquired a good deal of medical knowledge along the way. I knew the ropes. I came to believe that all my illnesses had led up to this moment in time so that I could lead Mom through the maze of the mysterious medical world.

When Mom's cancer made its entrance into our lives, I made a decision to drop everything and just be Mom's medical mentor. I was blessed with being able to do that, and going through cancer with Mom was one of the most profound experiences of all. It put to the test all those spiritual ideas I had learned and read about, and it carved another deep and winding groove into my soul. Even in the most difficult moments, I never lost sight of the honor I felt in being able to take care of my mom.

The surprising thing is: I completely stopped writing. No journaling. Nothing. I went into a whole new inner territory for those few years. I grabbed onto this role I'd been given and, in order to maintain it, I absolutely could not go into my vulnerable places and write about my feelings or what I was experiencing. I made that okay with myself. When the right time came, the pen would find its way into my hand and I would fill the pages waiting to be written.

My unique and close relationship with my mom is another story. In a nutshell, Mom had a huge and generous spirit, a silly and delightful sense of humor, all of which seemed to heighten through her cancer-through endless visits to doctors, gruesome and bewildering tests, chemotherapy, radiation, and the side effects from everything. We managed to keep laughing and we got to talk about everything in the world. Mom was truly my best friend and companion. She died in November 2003, the very day I sold my house in St. Augustine. A magical door opened for me, and I moved to Asheville one month later.

It was just last year, in mid-2005, that I came out of my shell of grief, exhaustion, another round of a personal health crisis, and rebirthed into a whole new life. I had dreamed for years of living in Asheville and of offering my Writing Naked classes to this rich, diverse, artistically fertile, and spiritually evolved community.

The other day I saw a friend I hadn't seen for awhile. She said, "Oh Annie! You're just glowing!" I thanked her and smiled inside because I knew this glow was evidence that I was truly embracing and following the love of my life. I am so blessed to be here now, and to be a part of Asheville, North Carolina.