Entering Through the Side Door

THIRTEEN years ago I attended my very first writers colony and began living a lie. The lie wasn’t to do with the worry writers often feel—that rude, wicked thing we call impostor’s syndrome, a fear that we aren’t qualified to put our thoughts onto the page and share with the world. No. The lie I was telling was an untruth about my own body: I was twenty-eight years old and five months into a pregnancy that was no longer viable outside my womb. A few days before flying from my home in New York City to the writers retreat in California, I’d gone in for an ultrasound to learn the sex of the baby that instead had revealed a tornado of birth defects and that my pregnancy was doomed. Within ten days, the doctors told me, I had to make a decision: to either terminate the pregnancy or do nothing and, well, miscarry. I was in shock as I changed out of my hospital gown and back into my street clothes and was sent home. I remember walking from Union Square to East 32nd Street—the busy sidewalks, people bustling, their focus on their own worlds, their own stories.

Instead of sitting around and marinating in my desolation, I decided to keep moving and go to the colony, which I had applied to months before and been given a scholarship to attend, since no matter what I did, my fate had already been handed to me. I was too afraid to be any trouble to anyone, not brave enough to put life on hold and nurture myself. Even though I was attending to study nonfiction—to study the art of fact—I decided not to