I could say I do not wish to be famous as a writer, but that would be a half-truth. Growing up I kept my brighter lights under a bushel barrel – middle of a “gang of seven” siblings. 

I was the quiet one. Maybe I was a bit famous for that. My father saw me as I was – a quiet one, smart, a voracious reader. With affection, he would sometimes call me Little Mouse.

Inside my mouse-ness, unrecognized by me, I was burning for recognition I believe. So when I extricated myself from my brown wool uniform and the mid-century Catholic strictures that came with it, I became a writer, a journalist.

 I wrote stories, sometimes front page stories, and got to see my name there in the byline. A certain kind of fame. It made me feel real.

As I matured as a writer, I realized I was not just doing this for my own ego. I was telling stories to the world for people whose stories needed to be told: the frightened, exhausted Russian Jews who escaped from the old Soviet Union, and those in this city who took them in.

The young woman who had been date-raped on campus and needed to tell her story – before the MeToo movement, when rape, especially among college students, was often swept under the rug. 

The woman who in deep middle age was finally ready to tell about living through the Holocaust and, upon being liberated by the Americans, with her mother, another survivor, trekked through dangerous war-torn Europe to get home. She chose me to tell her story to the world. I felt honored and awed. 

The college president who lived through Kristallnacht – telling me how his grandfather stood in the ruins of his business, clutching tattered pieces of the destroyed Torah, telling his young grandson, “We can put it back together.”

I had to meet in secret with the woman who was starting up the first local chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays in our city. She feared for the members, and for their queer children and friends who would need to remain closeted for a long time, yet. I like to think that my story helped to bring about the time when they no longer needed to hide.

I told a lot of other stories, not all serious, along the way in more than 30 years in the game. And I learned to listen. All those years ago, as Mouse, I had been learning to listen. 

I was famous, for a time, to those whose stories I told to the world. I would not mind being a bit famous with my foray into novel writing. I don’t think I would enjoy being a “celebrity” though. Getting thousands of people to “like” me has no appeal.

Writing a story that connects with readers – large numbers, or small – matters. And what truly matters is the writing itself. The pain and pleasure of doing it. The getting lost in the world of Story. Writing a story, a word artifact, that has the chance to sail out into the world, perhaps forever.