My first foray into the serious world of writing, began in University, where I was chosen as contributing editor to the Yeshiva University Newspaper. During my year as contributing editor, I wrote a series of seven editorials on University Life. I made a startling discovery that year. You can actually have an effect on people with words, and affect things that go on in your life with the right mix of humor and seriousness.
The year was 1977 and one of my contributions was actually a long piece of prose in memory of those who fell during the Yom Kippur war in Israel.
Those articles marked the beginning of my career as a writer and made a lasting impression upon me. When that edition of that paper came out with the prose, it was my second piece of seven, (I didn't even know it had been published) I was interrupted during the middle of class and told that I must report to the assistant deans office immediately. Of course I went there trying to figure out just what trouble I had managed to get myself into now. The secretary told me to go straight in, though her face was impossible to read. The woman who was the assistant dean at the time immediately asked me to close the door behind me, a strange request, but one I was not going to argue with. Only then, after closing the door did I realize that she had been crying. She took a few moments to gain some composure then explained that while at lunch she picked up a copy of the University paper and made the mistake of reading my poem while eating. Since then, she said, she had been crying and she had called me to her office to let me know just what an effect it had on her.
I spent years with that story hidden deep inside of me. It was one of those times in life when something so mundane happens which is also so incredibly spectacular that only a long time later do you realize just how it changed you. Until that point in time I was writing just to show that I could do it, and better than most people. I never suffered, then at least, from doubts in my ability (now I suffer them almost every minute). I knew my articles were read and made people laugh and even snicker at the absurdity of University life. But I never imagined, never entertained the thought that with words I can make people FEEL. And once one has held that magic elixir in their hands, the moment that key has been used - only once - to open someone's' heart, it is addictive. The rest of one's life no matter how successful or how many times one fails in other endeavors, becomes a quest to use that key yet again.
At that moment I knew I was a writer.
Once bitten with the writing bug, that was that. Everything I did in life, on every roller-coaster that fate has taken me, I have always sought a way to write about and share those experiences. In non-fiction and in fiction. For children and for adults. I have rarely been successful. Most other times I have failed, sometimes dismally. But I am a writer.