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As we close out the last week of turbulent 2020, there are 15 boxes stacked precariously on a couch in the small living room of this house. There are another 20 or so identical boxes crammed floor-to-ceiling in a dark corner of the basement. All of them contain what I refer to grandiosely as “my papers.”By that I mean a lifetime’s accumulation of letters, newspaper clippings, reporter’s notebooks, photocopied articles, three-ring binders, file folders, photographs, ID cards and driver’s licenses, magazines and journals (Gramophone, The Armchair Detective, Studies in Bibliography), drafts of short stories and poems and even a few elementary school compositions and college essays. Everything has been stashed away higgledy-piggledy, a system that I’ve been known to rationalize by murmuring a line from poet Wallace Stevens: “A great disorder is an order.”
By Krystyna Poray Goddu | Dec 18, 2020
Darcie Little Badger wrote her first book a 40-page mystery when she was in first grade, and even submitted it to a publisher, with help from her father, then a graduate student of English literature. Undeterred by the publisher’s rejection, she kept writing, producing a 400-page fantasy at the age of 12. She never doubted that she was a writer, so when she was rejected (twice) by Princeton University’s creative writing program, she decided to pursue a newly discovered interest in oceanography instead, ultimately earning a PhD in the subject. “I thought, okay, I’ll just do the writing on my own, then,” she recalls.