An Aunt, a Niece, and Their Ordinary Creative Lives

A creative bond that's hard to put into words

My aunt and I speak a different language than the rest of our family. She’s my dad’s younger sister, and it’s not quite what you’d expect; it’s a literary language, things like the mystery of what’s left unsaid in the white space and the feeling that you get with the shift in tone of a piece or landing the perfect last sentence. Sometimes, I know it seems a little “woo-woo” to everyone else in our family, how we’re always waiting to catch the next wave of inspiration to build a career (and a life) riddled with uncertainty.

I remember our first trip to Barnes & Noble when I was in high school and she bought me my own copy of Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, which I still re-read today two decades later. She walked around the store like she knew exactly where she was going, grabbing copies of everything I needed to read like The Paris Review and Poets & Writers. We’d find a table in the café and thumb through the stack. In high school, college, and even several years after in my early twenties, she knew I couldn’t afford a cup of coffee, let alone a $50 pile of magazines and books. “Lunch is on me,” she would say, and somehow, I would always come home with a new book for my growing collection, later additions like Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas and The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris.

My mom will tell you she remembers stapling lined paper together when I was four years old because I needed to write a chapter book, but it was high school when I really caught the writing bug and asked Aunt Holly to mentor me for school credit. She ran a literary magazine with fellow writing friends from her days earning an MFA in creative writing and teaching English at several universities. I’d spend my afternoons at her dining room table learning about the submission process and how to know if you’re reading something horrible or great.