It’s official: I’m a writer. The cat is out of the bag in my neighborhood. The local newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald, did an author interview with me due to me becoming the Hemingway writer-in-residence. They even sent a photographer and ran it on the first page. A few people have stopped my husband on the street and told him he’s got a famous wife. (I’ll bask in that one while it lasts!)

So now, whenever I introduce myself and someone asks, “So what do you do?” I better say, “I’m a writer.” I do that most of the time anyway, but it took me a long time to get to that. It was easier to say, “I teach English composition,” because then the follow-up question was, “where do you teach?” rather than, “so what do you write?” or, “where have you been published?”

For some reason, I don’t have a pat answer yet to the question what I write, and while I can rattle off a nice list of publications, it still feels awkward to do this. Similarly, it felt awkward to answer the journalist’s questions on why I write what I write. But I have to say that overall this was a good first interview experience, and with practice I’m sure I’ll get better versed in this packaging myself as a writer.