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I was a poet for the first ten years of my writing life. Then I started writing poems that, according to my writing group friend, made better stories than poems. And she was right. I began to write a memoir with no idea what I was doing and little confidence that I could do it. Nevertheless, I persisted. Almost ten years later (I hate to count, really) I have a memoir manuscript that I am shopping around.

[Aside: “Shopping around” is a breezy term that hardly captures a great deal of internet research and baring your writerly heart to strangers who will ghost you or—even worse—see your writerly heart and send you an exquisitely polite and well-thought-out rejection letter.]

While I endure the process of looking for an agent, I have begun another project. Beginning a prose project (a book? a series of essays? we’ll see) looks very different now than it did ten years ago. Although my early drafts are still brutally terrible and I stumble along in confusion, I now have a tiny thread of confidence. (Not a lot of confidence, let’s not be hasty.) This time I know that if I persist, I will have a piece of writing that I can show to another person.

Let me quantify that. It took me four months of researching and writing two hours a day before I showed up to my full-time job to write 10,000 words that eventually became a 3000-word essay. There are more efficient ways to write and live, but this is my way.

How much ink do you waste use to make a shining final draft?

(Photo by Julia Joppien on Unsplash)

At some point (maybe around 2010 or so), I read Obsessive Genius by Barbara Goldsmith, and it changed my writing life. This was a book not just about Marie Curie’s accomplishments, it was also about how a poor Polish woman became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. There was all the domestic detail a nosy writer could ask for about how she managed her life and her work.

The personal lives of scientists became my new interest. How did one woman become a successful scientist in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while another woman became merely a woman who knew more about science than her peers? It was place, education, and encouragement. It was class, ambition, and personality. It was all fascinating.

“Marie Curie’s Kitchen” began its life as an idea. I was in the early twenty-first century still trying to kill the Angel in the House, Virginia Woolf’s specter of domesticity. I had a sink full of dirty dishes and poems to write. What did Marie Curie’s kitchen look like? was my rebellious thought.

The idea became a poem, and then a few years later it became prose. My friend encouraged me to submit a piece to Flashback Fiction, a journal of historical flash fiction. It never occurred to me that I could write fiction. However, a slightly fictional interpretation of real-life events I thought I could manage. Evidently the editors thought so too. Today you can read “Marie Curie’s Kitchen” up at Flashback Fiction.

What’s your favorite personal detail about a historical figure?