The following article was originally posted on the Courier Record website.

Isak Dinesen once wrote in her short story, Babette’s Feast, that “A great artist is never poor.”

I may not be ready to call myself great yet, but those words certainly ring true for me. No matter where I live, what I do, or whether I get paid or not, I will always be a writer.

This all started during childhood. At a young age, my parents realized I loved to write and they usually gave me a large box of stationery for Christmas, brightly-colored paper with matching envelopes. By the end of the day, I would be sitting at a table, writing my thank you notes.

When I started going to Camp High Rocks in Brevard, North Carolina, I was 12, and campers had to present a letter home to counselors every Thursday night in order to see the movie; I usually handed over a few letters.

As I began to travel, summer school in the South of France, junior year abroad at The Sorbonne, a whistle-stop tour around Asia. . . there were long colorful letters sent home. My parents used to read them to their friends, and I have always taken that as a compliment.

I am one of those writers who is an audodidact. I didn’t study journalism in college (I was a history major) nor did I intern for a newspaper. I taught myself by placing publications like The New York Times and Vanity Fair around my typewriter and later computer and circled sentences so I could teach myself how to set-up quotes.

I also read, read, read – authors like Austen, Colette, Steinbeck, and Capote. When I lived in Washington, D.C. (while selling handbags at Woodward and Lothrop), if it was a day to write, I would force myself to walk around town ‘til I had an idea or plot in my head. This always worked.

Part of the reason I moved to Southside Virginia is I knew there would be plenty of amusing and unusual stories. Furthermore, an area like this sparks your imagination.

I never climbed Mt. Everest but when I was 22, I traveled around the world, visited friends in New Zealand and Australia, crewed on sailboats in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea, and settled down in the Seychelles, a Communist country a thousand miles off the coast of Africa.

Two and a half years later, I returned home. I had taught school and learned Creole. I had lost a friend to Leptospirosis. And I had fled a very bad coup d’etat. With a trip like that, it wasn’t hard to find a publisher for my story, and I’ve been writing ever since.

I always knew I could sell articles if I visited interesting places, talked to interesting people, and tended to write about subjects no one else bothered with. This explains why I have fished with oystermen; ridden in police cars, lights flashing, sirens blaring; spent time with a man sentenced to life in prison for murder; and visited former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill.

I do have a few ground rules, however: I tend to stay away from math, science, and economics, and I don’t interview gang members.

My heart is heavy these days because one of my mentors, Allan Brownfeld, just died at 85. Author, expert on the Middle East, syndicated columnist, staff for a Viceyears President and Congressmen. He printed my first articles in the early 1980s and, just as importantly, gave me confidence to find my way.

Thanks to people like Allan, I will always paint with words.