About My Writing — by Anne Nayer, one of the authors in the anthology Mud Flat Shorts (mostly fiction)

I have written all my life beginning as an 8-year-old sitting on a park bench in New York City scribbling tales of Pegasus and flying through the sky and, over the past 10 years, writing a weekly 5-minute Postcard from Paradise – a radio spot for our local NPR station, but it wasn’t until Alec and Gabi invited me to be a part of Mud Flat Shorts (mostly fiction) that I stepped into becoming a ‘real’ writer, in the same way Pinocchio finally became a “real” boy.  I was well on my way, having joined a wonderful writing community at the beginning of the Pandemic – a community that has kept me writing on a regular basis and one in which I started to embrace a gift for words and the telling of stories that continues to surprise and delight me, and, it appears, others as well.

What emerged from my weekly writings was a series of vignettes that started taking shape as a memoir: accounts and reflections, beginning with a devastating early childhood family trauma and moving in snapshots, weaving themes and threads through what has been a rich, adventurous and off the beaten path life that has also been grounded in the everyday of relationships, marriage, motherhood, divorce, losses, celebrations…  all to the background tunes of the world as it erupted and coasted and changed along with me. 

I am grateful to Alec and Gabi and to Mud Flat Press for honoring me with a place in this anthology where I get to keep company with a group of inspired and gifted writers.  The invitation and the actual book in hand feels like a green light for my next chapter where I go from being a psychotherapist and life coach who dabbles in writing and painting in her spare time to putting creation and art front and center in my life and realizing my dream of being a ‘real’ artist.  Thank you.