Zibby Mag

By Amanda Warner

I felt like the twelve-year-old camper who was invited to sit at the counselors’ table when I attended the Moms Don’t Have Time to Retreat.

The setting didn’t matter, though perhaps it was less intimidating to join Zibby Owens’s virtual salon from my laptop than Deborah Goodrich Royce’s Ocean House in Rhode Island. The three-day event included listening to conversations among published authors and participating in Zoom chats alongside writers and other women in the publishing industry.

I am not a published author nor a mom, yet I wanted to attend the retreat to meet my virtual friend Zibby in person, to fan-girl authors whom I admire, and to be among like-minded smart women who appreciate the craft of storytelling. I expected to learn more about the authors whose books I enjoy, to leave with more books to read and to travel to New England for a fall weekend. I did not expect to have the internal spark of recognizing that I am a writer, and a confident one at that.

I was writing constantly until the age of twenty-three when I earned my Master’s Degree and became an Adult Who Worked. As life twisted and turned, my career dreams evolved from broadcast journalism to entertainment media to strategic communications (along with degrees in communication studies, public relations, and communications research), but never manifested. Instead, shortly after earning my Master’s Degree, I stumbled into a career in commercial real estate. Since then, the majority of my professional writing has been Property Reports, Policies and Procedures Manuals, and Permit Applications.

Somewhere in that post-academic journey, I tucked my writing enthusiasm away as a keepsake. But the panels at the retreat on relationships, friendships, identity, memoir, essays, and grief reawakened the joys of narrative nonfiction.

I’m writing this essay for myself. Not that I need to justify the fact that I know how to write, but to remind myself that I enjoy the craft of writing, rewriting, and editing. I enjoy getting that “shit draft” (technical term learned in an undergraduate English class) onto the page and then polishing it with syntax, structure, and style.

Despite not writing, I’ve consistently maintained a journal-writing practice since college, and I write most nights. It takes about nine minutes to write one page; I know this because I include my start and stop time. Some nights that lined page seems so vast that I resort to filling it with the usual laundry list of thoughts on repeat in my head. Other nights I finish the lines before my brain is done processing an idea. Regardless of the minutiae, it keeps me accountable to myself and is part of my bedtime routine: write journal page, read novel on nightstand, go to sleep when eyes get too heavy to read.

In summary, thank you, Zibby, and other virtual friends like Kristy Woodson Harvey, for reminding me that I like writing. That I am good at writing. That I can synthesize ideas and clearly convey them to others. Sometimes with gravitas, other times with nostalgia, and, on rare occasions, with humor.

Being welcomed by the counselors to join their table reminded this camper she can be confident and comfortable with her voice — written and spoken — as a writer.

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Amanda Warner is a native Detroiter who moved to South Florida for the weather. With a day job in commercial real estate, she is most herself when reading books, talking about books, listening to bookish podcasts, walking in her community, baking for friends and family, and doing yoga and Pilates.