Here is how it happens: I am six years old and The Empire Strikes Back has just come out. I am at a Chinese restaurant with my mother and father and grandparents after church. There are no other kids. To keep me occupied, my mother gives me some paper and a pen, but instead of drawing pictures I decide that I am going to write the sequel to The Empire Strikes Back. I am going to write what comes next for Luke and Leai and Han. I will save them all.
I write in my best penmanship, skipping every other line just like at school, fill a whole page, front and back. My mom tells me what a good job I’ve done. I read my story, turn the paper over and over, proud of how much there is, but also aware of how much is missing. There’s no dialogue, no suspense, no edge-of-your-seat action. It’s nothing like a movie, and I feel disappointed. I want to write something as good as a movie but don’t know how. I want to know how.
Here is how it happens: I am in high school. I am sitting at the drafting table in my room, waiting for a ride to the mall to meet my girlfriend. I have plans to go to college and become an architect, maybe a wildlife biologist. For some reason I decide I should write my girlfriend a poem. The poem comes out saccharine and overearnest. I steal lines from the music I am listening to. But there is something about the act of writing the poem that feels exciting, something creatively rewarding. Maybe I could be a poet, I think to myself. When I share my poem with my girlfriend and she laughs at it, I put that idea on hold.
Here is how it happens: I am in college and one of the classes I’ve signed up for gets canceled due to low enrollment. I am now majoring in outdoor education. A friend suggests I take the Intro to Fiction class he’s in. It’ll be easy, he says.
In the class, I write my first real story. I stack a boombox on top of a word processor and start typing. I write about the idiosyncrasies of Northern Wisconsin, where I’m from, a land so different from Arizona, where I’m attending school. Something clicks, and I finally begin to wrap my head (barely) around all the storytelling devices I wondered about in that Chinese restaurant so long ago. When I get my story back from my professor, she tells me it has promise. She offers revision suggestions and encourages me to submit it to a writing contest being held by the college’s literary journal. I do, and it wins first prize. I change my major again, this time to creative writing.
Today, I am a writer, teacher, trail runner, and river rat. My books include the YA novel A Series of Small Maneuvers and the story collection Close Is Fine. My work has been recognized with a Reading the West Award, an Oregon Book Awards Readers’ Choice Award, and a Wisconsin Library Association Literary Award. A Series of Small Maneuvers was also included in Better with Books: 500 Diverse Books to Ignite Empathy and Encourage Self-Acceptance in Teens and Tweens. I live in La Grande, Oregon, where I am Assistant Professor of English/Writing at Eastern Oregon University and serve on the board of directors of the literary arts organization Fishtrap, Inc.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Eliot Treichel’s Damien Mayhew’s Secret Recipe for Life in the spring of 2028.
