It started with an Olivetti― my first typewriter as an eleven-year-old―and a stack of clean white onionskin paper. When I sat down at my desk, the click of the keys made it official. I was no longer filling my journal with trivial notations about clothes and boy-girl parties and what my science teacher had to say about my lack of interest in geology.

I was writing.

Poems, stories and the 6^th grade play. Once I began, I never stopped. A memoir, two novels, poetry, short stories and essays from middle school through college, in the slim borders between marriage and children and jobs.

I am not a former Prom Queen. I was the quiet smart girl with the black marbled composition book, writing tortured poetry and wearing a beret with a cigarette dangling from the corner of my mouth. But I was also the girl who wanted to belong somehow to a tribe―without changing who I was. I held the same wish we all share: to be known and understood for who we truly are.

Writing is my key to that door. The world of words. The naming of things. My place in the world.

Here I will chronicle my creative life, moment to moment, in a blend of memoir, fiction, poetry and inspiration. I will tell you the things I really want to say the way I want to say them. And share what I can about what I have discovered. Day-to-day, in the moment. Observing and recording, bearing witness.

The Bitter and the Sweet brings together a hopeful patchwork of words and images, memories and quotes. The journey of making art while life―with its rough edges and joyful mysteries―happens around me, unfolding like a lotus flower from the mud.