Failed bio attempt #1
Writing your own bio is hard. Really hard. On my first attempt for this site, I wrote what is far more suited to a blog post, so here it is:
Rachel knew she was a writer in the 2nd grade, when her teacher, Mrs. Kleinman, told her mother she’d be a high school drop out. This is not to say that because Rachel was destined to drop out of high school, she knew she was a writer. In fact, these two events have no causal relationship whatsoever. Thus, it would be more correct to state, “In the 2nd grade, Rachel knew she was a writer. That same year, through no fault of Rachel’s new-found career, Mrs. Kleinman told her mother she would drop out of high school.”
Well, that’s not exactly true, either. The reason Mrs. Kleinman was convinced of Rachel’s impending delinquency had to do with writing. It had to do with writing too much. Rachel fell behind on her Alphabet Stories, and by the end of the year had only reached the letter “P.” You see, starting with the letter “F,” Rachel entertained her friends with a soap opera about a bowl of Fruit that lived in a Field. At “G,” a bunch of Grapes came to visit. And the saga continued throughout the alphabet, 8 – 12 pages at a time; and a second grader just can’t write that much in a single week.
Contrary to Mrs. Kleinman’s dire prediction, Rachel did graduate from high school – on time, even – and continued on to Smith College and the University of Southern California. She studied theatre and mathematics and earned a degree in technical direction for theatre. You may have noticed she did not study writing. Rachel forgot, for a while, that she was a writer. Or maybe being forced to finish her Alphabet Stories over the summer vacation soured Rachel on writing, for a time. We’ll never know for sure.
But Rachel couldn’t escape writing for long. As her job at Center Theatre Group evolved to fit the changing needs of both the company and Rachel herself, words and language played a larger and larger role. Before too much time had passed, words and language were nearly her entire job. And she couldn’t have been happier about it.
Because Rachel loves words.