“Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.” 

Jane Yolen

The first writing I recall other than school assignments was entering a slogan contest for M&Ms when I was nine or ten. The details remain fuzzy to me but my mother always insisted I came up with “melts in your mouth, not in your hand.” Hah! Either she misremembered, many others came up with the same suggestion, or I got shafted out of millions in residuals. 

I never really cared but lately I got curious.  According to various web sites, Forrest Mars, son of the founder of the Mars Company, went to Europe during the Spanish Civil War and saw soldiers eating British candies called Smarties. Those chocolates surrounded by hard colored candy pellets allowed soldiers to carry chocolate without having it melt. Inspired by the idea, he produced his own version in 1941 called M&Ms and the product took off during WWII when M&Ms were sold exclusively for soldiers. The original slogan, “The milk chocolate melts in your mouth--not in your hand," was purportedly shortened to, “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand,” by Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates advertising firm in 1954. I still wonder why Mars had a slogan contest when they already had an obvious plus point and hired Reeves to fine-tune it.

Around that same age, I entered a photo contest and I think the title I wrote for it helped me clinch the prize. It was a picture of my redheaded, freckle-faced little brother and I called it “Map of Ireland”—another creative writing attempt as a kid.

Ireland was still stirring my creative juices in high school; I won a national essay contest writing about the Irish Potato Famine of the 1800s. On a personal level, it explained somewhat why my grandma, who grew up in a thatched-roof peasant cottage on a landowner’s estate, immigrated to New York alone when she was sixteen years of age; she left because there was nothing for her to eat. It wasn’t that other foods weren’t available when the potato crops failed; the Irish just couldn't afford to buy any of them due to extortionist rents, high taxation, and the suppression of goods.

In high school, I had my first job. It was as a library page and it remains one of my favorites because it gave me access to so many books with varied styles of writing.

In college, I wrote a lot of term papers but I also wrote poems about my inner emotional life and scribbled down memories of personal traumatic events, like a family beach vacation that included a scary bout of croup for my youngest brother and the brake failure of my car.

 I also kept my first diary during my college years when I used my meager savings to take my first trip to Europe. I had visions of A Moveable Feast ala Hemingway, but I didn’t have the good fortune to befriend a scintillating group of expat artists and writers in Paris. Still, the trip was eye-opening for a twenty something and my diary is filled with impressions of new experiences, places that amazed me, and people and things that perplexed me. 

I've always loved hearing stories and reading and I think love of writing comes from that. My earliest memories of stories are nursery rhymes. I don't remember having a book of them in the house but I do remember hearing them from my Mom and my Nana over and over again in singsong fashion. We often recited them together and I loved memorizing them at a young age. I've always loved words too and I thank my dad and his wonderful vocabulary for that.

Growing up with five siblings and having lots of playtime with cousins and neighbors exposed me to all kinds of temperaments, interests and abilities. Those experiences help when I'm trying to create believable and varied characters for the stories I write today.

I also think it was an advantage that my developmental years were pretty much technology-free. A lot of my activities were fueled by imagination, something a writer needs a lot of. 

Finally, I credit the discipline of my early schooling with giving me the tools to write complete sentences, having decent grammar and punctuation and the persistence to work hard at improving my craft every day.