I got my first library card on a field trip to the Littleton Public Library when I was six. I already loved to read and was astonished and delighted to discover an entire building full of books. Books that I could take home with me! I thought I would never run out of things to read. I started sneaking a flashlight into bed with me so I could read into the night, putting the flashlight back in the kitchen drawer early every morning. Years later, my first job was reshelving books in the Englewood Public Library.

I have had many more library cards since my first – City & County of Denver, University of Denver, and Iowa City, IA. I’ve had temporary cards in Ankeny, IA, and Rochester, MN. Now I have an Arapahoe County card here in Colorado, where one library card allows access to every public library in the state. Along the way, I also came to love bookstores, from the old downtown Denver newsstand, no longer in business, where my father and I used to go to buy paperback books, to independent bookstores everywhere I have lived, including Prairie Lights in Iowa City. I have never run out of books to read.

The myth in my family of origin, from the time I was an argumentative schoolgirl, was that I would grow up to be a trial lawyer. I always thought I would be a writer and, as I grew older, a university professor teaching literature in a women’s studies department. I did teach, many years later, in the free community school in Denver now known as Colorado Free University, but I did not become a professor. When I graduated from the University of Denver in 1974 with a degree in American Studies, the only job I could find was as a typesetter. University jobs in literature were scarce and graduate school didn’t seem like a good option. The next fall, I started law school.  I kept writing, off and on, through having three children, starting my own practice, divorce, remarriage and the unexpected delight of a blended family of four teenagers, first retirement, and relocation to Iowa City with my husband.

I have an MFA (2007) in creative writing (fiction) from the low residency program at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina, where I began to learn about writing fiction. During the pandemic, I completed the two-year Book Project (2022) at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, where I wrote memoir and learned how to put together a book length manuscript. I also began to study poetry as I experimented with form, voice, and point of view to address difficult content. I discovered a multitude of small presses, publishing innovative and experimental work.

Writing is an expansive daily practice. It includes writing, making collage art, taking writing classes (craft and generative), looking at art, being with other poets in the Poet to Poet community, participating in ongoing writers’ groups with poets and prose writers, hosting an online salon for experimental prose writers, sometimes thinking without doing anything else, and, of course, reading every day.

Janie Braverman, Autumn 2024