I know, I know. Where have I been? It’s been a whole month since I’ve uttered a word on this blog. That’s a first for me, since I’ve managed to keep my goal of two posts per month throughout the past year. Until now.
I can assure you that I wasn’t lolly-gagging though. I spent most of February getting my shizz together with my creative writing. Then, life stuff came up, including the unexpected passing of a former employer earlier this month, which kept me off the grid a bit, so to speak.
He was the Editor-in-Chief/Founder of the Spanish weekly newspaper I wrote for shortly after graduating college. It was a huge shock seeing his picture with a “…has died” caption underneath it.
The last time I saw him was nearly seven years ago, about a week or two before moving out-of-state for graduate school. Right away I made arrangements to attend his funeral, since he was my former boss and I “knew him”.
But I didn’t know him, which I realized when I walked into the funeral home and set eyes on the hundreds of candid photos of him and his family laid out in two separate collages.
The only sure thing I knew about him was that he had taken a chance on a virtual unknown with Spanish as her second language who knocked on his door asking to write for his paper. For that, I will always be grateful to him.
It was a stark reminder of the old life I had left behind before moving away to grad school: a freelance writer who worked from home and was distant from other people including her own co-workers, something that I vowed to never put myself through in my new life.
Since the funeral, I’ve been thinking about my place in the world at large as a writer (especially an Ethnic-American one) and all the freelance writing I’ve done.
Coincidentally, I recently came across a narrative Non-fiction piece that I wrote for In the Fray magazine in 2010. Check it out!
The Fearless Wordsmith 