I’ve always wanted to be a writer. And I’ve always been a writer. Starting with my first story when I was seven about a princess, written in pencil on a Big Chief tablet. My mother typed my story on her home Smith-Corona, double-spaced manuscript style. When I held the crisp white pages in my hands and saw “by Charla Gabert” at the top in big black letters, I was hooked. I wrote my first poem in third grade and immediately memorized it, allowing me to share it with you now.

FALL

When the leaves turn red and gold,
And fall upon the ground,
Then you can be very sure
That fall has come around.
When the pumpkins
Turn bright orange
And ducks fly overhead
Then you can be very sure
Because the leaves turn red.

When I was asked to read my poem aloud in Mrs. Lorch’s third-grade classroom at West Boulevard Elementary in Columbia, Missouri, I changed the title from “Fall” to “Autumn,” because, let’s face it, the word “autumn” is more literary and melancholy than plain old “fall.”

No doubt, my interest in writing was fueled by my love of reading. It’s hard to fall in love with a book that transports you like a magic carpet into another world and then not want to write a book. (I don’t know how the “normal” reader does it! And by normal, I mean, “reads for pleasure and doesn’t aspire secretly or otherwise to be a writer.”)

I followed my love of writing through high school, where I served on the literary magazine staff and was the editor of the school newspaper my senior year. I also made a sudden swerve from the math-and-science track I’d pursued diligently when I signed up for a creative writing class (along with English literature) my senior year and dropped calculus! Unheard of! Creative writing was an “elective,” and I actually had to get permission to take two English classes in one academic year. (This was Memphis in 1973-74, so go figure.)

In college I stumbled into a course called “Personal and Creative Writing” with Blossom Kirschenbaum, an inspiring teacher. I started taking fiction writing classes with John Hawkes and made my way to Issues magazine, a monthly published by students. I served as the editor of Issues during my last year at Brown and had a summer internship at Ms. Magazine. These two experiences led me to pursue magazine publishing in New York City.

There I landed my first job at Jewish Living magazine, which promptly folded after a year. And then a friend alerted me to a job in fact-checking at New York Magazine. All during this I was writing short stories, and finally I took the chance to apply to creative writing programs at Stanford and Johns Hopkins. I chose the second because of the generous teaching fellowship and the feeling that California was just too far away from my East Coast friends. (Fool that I was, I could have been living in paradise for decades before I moved to the Bay area for work.)

After that one-year master’s program, so wonderful but way too short, I ended up in Boston teaching freshman English at Boston University as a part-time lecturer. This career path, I can tell you from experience, is downwardly mobile. So, deciding once again to see how I might make a living as a writer, I applied for jobs in “corporate communications,” having a vague understanding that companies needed and hired writers. What exactly they wrote, I would find out on the job.

An ad in the Boston Globe for a writer and editor at a company called Compugraphic caught my attention; I actually recognized the company as making typesetting equipment. I interviewed and was hired at the glorious salary of $22,000 a year! Heaven! No more starving-artist struggles.

From there I launched a 26-year-old career in marketing and communications in tech companies in Boston. My writing skills were the bedrock on which I built my career, learning many other things along the way and having a front-row seat at the digital revolution. My last employer relocated my husband and me to California in 1997, and that’s where I’ve been ever since—home at last.

Now that I’m retired, I’m back to writing for fun and fulfillment: taking classes and workshops, writing blog posts, and working on a memoir and other personal writing. I love my weekly “Wild Writing” practice group, led by Julie Barton in Piedmont, CA, and my online writing group, Writing Out Loud Sisterhood, created by Marilyn Bosquin, Lynchburg, VA. And I still get excited when I type “by Charla Gabert” at the top of a manuscript.