Ensley made me a poet.
When I was one, my parents and I moved into a tiny apartment off 20th Street. I wrote my first poem sitting in the corner of my bedroom, surrounded by toys. I was 7 or 8 and the poem was for my best friend who had moved away. I was angry with him for being willing to leave me, and when I get angry, I get mean. I figured his leaving would be easier to face, if I pushed him away first. But as soon as the moving truck pulled away, I realized how foolish I'd been.
So I wrote him a poem to apologize. The poem was terrible, of course, but with it, a lifelong love affair began — not with the boy who moved away, but with the written word. As an adult, I'd write poems about playing kickball in the parking lot of those Ensley apartment blocks, and poems about trips to see the candy lady and to the corner store.
When people ask me where in Birmingham I grew up, I sometimes say "Everywhere". We moved around a lot and the neighborhoods of Birmingham find their way into so much of what I write.
I had to leave Birmingham to learn how to tell true stories in prose (散文). After college in Alabama and graduate school in Berkeley, California, I moved to Kentucky to be a newspaper reporter. My skill at writing personal essays landed me my own column(专栏) and the chance to be included in a collection of essays published by Seal Press.
Then I came home.
In her book Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg writes, "It is very important to go home if you want your work to be whole...you must claim where you come from and look deep into it. Come to honor and embrace it, or at the least, accept it."
Now in Birmingham, I get to share my story in local magazines and on my blog. And I build my story through every friendship formed in this city of steel, sweat, and sweet tea.
