Who I am and why I write

 I haven't done this for a while, so...

My name is Lauren Leach-Steffens, and I am 57 years old, about to turn 58 in a couple weeks. I don't feel that old unless I try to sleep on the ground while camping, and then I feel every year of that and more. When I am not writing, I teach college at a small midwestern regional university. I'm an associate professor who has had tenure for the past 15 years.

I am a writer. I write contemporary fantasy, with the philosophy that the unusual is hidden in plain sight for those who know to look. My world, which looks much the same as this one, hides preternatural beings, people with hidden talents, and legends that shape the earth for lifetimes.

I first declared myself a writer at age seven, when my third grade teacher posted my Groundhog Day poem on the classroom door. I remember going home and telling my mother I wanted to be a poet when I grew up. She asked me if I wanted to eat, and I was the sort of person who liked cookies more than just about anything. So I said "Yes," and my mother informed me that poets starved. It was then I set aside my dream of becoming a poet.

It wasn't that I quit writing. I wrote poetry and stories all throughout school. In fifth grade, I got roped into writing a poem for a high school neighbor (even though it was cheating) -- he got an A. My eighth grade English teacher collected two years' worth of poetry and gave it back to me to keep when I left eighth grade.

I wrote poems and short stories (although I know now they were more character sketches) throughout my life, even as I was working on my PhD, but I didn't make much of it. I didn't revise for publication, I didn't let people read them, I didn't publish them.

And then, five years ago, I started writing a series of short stories and character sketches around a general plot line, and my husband said, "If you're going to write all these stories about the same thing, you might as well write a novel." 

I didn't think I could. But as I started writing, I came up with a first draft. A problematic first draft that I am still revising. But then I wrote another and another.

My novels have not been published yet, but I have had short stories and poetry published and recognized -- an essay in A3 Review, poems in Sad Girl and by Riza Press, short stories that have won honorable mention by Cook Publishing and New Millennium Writings and Sunspots, to name a few. 

I have dreams -- getting one of those novels published, getting published in a more selective journal (even though I write fantasy), getting something to really brag about. But for now, I write, and I continue writing.