The story of me, part 1

I haven’t properly introduced myself.

My name is Greg. I’m 41 years old.

I’ve always been interested in writing for as long as I can remember, and I’ve tried my hand at songwriting, drawing, and painting.

When I was in third grade, I wrote a choose-your-own-adventure story that I shared with my classmates. I typed it up on my mom’s typewriter and turned it into a booklet.

Thirty years later, I can’t find that booklet and don’t remember the name of it. It might be lost forever, which, now that I think about it, makes me a little sad. But I guess that happens sometimes, after thirty years.

There were other things I tried. As an example, when I was in high school I wrote a jazz piece, arranged it for big band, and got it played and recorded by a jazz band at the local college.

All this happened in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where I grew up.

I also wrote some songs and recorded a demo, but didn’t do anything further with it. Well, I suppose I did perform the songs at college at a performance I did a few years later, once, but that was it.

From an early age I also had an interest in drawing . . .

. . . and painting.

But writing was always my first love. When I went to college, I majored in creative writing.

I wrote for the college newspaper. I ended up writing about 12 columns and over 30 articles. (I remember those numbers because I counted them up once when I was preparing my résumé.)

I was also the editor of the college literary magazine one year.

All of this was at Southwest State University, now known as Southwest Minnesota State University.

Naturally, when I was taking creative writing classes there, I wrote some poems and a few stories.

I’m going to have to go back and think about how many of my poems are publishable and deserve homes in literary journals. I tried to get some of them published, but not as hard as I could have.

I did get one of my poems accepted for publication by the journal Amelia, but unfortunately the editor passed away before he could publish it.

I also got a prose poem accepted for publication by the journal Thema, and that one actually did get published.

Of all the creative work I’ve done, what I’m most proud of is a collection of animal stories I began to write, one in which each story is narrated by a different animal.

I had planned for my animal stories collection to grow to include about 25-30 stories. It was going to cover the entire animal kingdom, with the first story being narrated by an amoeba and the last one by a human being, with stories set all across the world.

During my college days, I only wrote five animal stories at most. Maybe less, since one of those five isn’t finished, at least one other deserves a rewrite, and still one other isn’t really of publishable quality.

In the fifteen years or so that followed, I got away from writing. I got away from pretty much all my other creative endeavors, too. There’s a whole story about that, and it’s covered in parts 2 and 3. But for now my point is that I’m now starting to get back into all that stuff again now. And this blog will chronicle that effort.

This has been part 1 of my story, covering 1976 – 1999.

Part 2 will cover 2000 – 2007.

Part 3 will cover 2008 – 2017.

Part 4 (if I decide to create it) will cover the future: November 2017 and beyond.