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I've had the writing bug for almost as long as I can remember. It is not something you can kick. As a child I wrote poems extolling the beauty and spirit of my favorite horse, Flame. She was too wild to ride in reality, but in my poems, I raced across the prairie on her bareback. At eighteen, I not only left the western Kansas farm I grew up on, but I left Kansas, headed, I thought, for a more exciting life in the city. But the most exciting thing I did in San Francisco was leave it some years later, to live in a remote mountain cabin in the Mojave Desert. Thinking I would become this modern-day Thoreau, I tapped out stories on an old manual typewriter and sent them off to The New Yorker and the other best magazines. Before long, I'd papered my outhouse walls in rejections slips.
After years of this kind of struggle, the first story I ever published was about Kansas and my father. When I went to graduate school at the famous Iowa Writers' Workshop, I thought I would be writing stories about my experiences in 1960s San Francisco or my bold adventure in the wilds of the Mojave, but no, my fingers tapped out more stories about my family and about my brief return to Kansas in my mid-thirties, to have my son. No matter where I've lived or what I've done for a living since, I keep coming back to Kansas in my writing. Why? I didn't understand this then, but do now. My most fundamental identity came from those prairies where I grew up, and as much as I wanted to believe that identity was secure, I knew, deep down, that it was not.
For more about my work, please visit www.julenebair.com.
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