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Therese Anne Fowler, It All Comes Down To This
1. I was among the first girls in the United States to play Little League Baseball, and the only girl in my local league the entire four years I played. Our town had a perfectly fine girls’ softball league, but I had little use for anything that was traditionally or strictly meant for girls. Baseball was more fun anyway. However, my vision needed correction, so I wasn’t as good a player as I might have been.
2. Unlike most of the women I know, I’m not very keen on chocolate. I do like it, just no more so than I like many other things. My husband is actually the chocolate-eater in our house. My go-to treat and comfort food is popcorn. Best version is topped with browned butter and grated parmesan cheese.
3. And speaking of food: I have such a strong aversion to shrimp that not only will I never eat them, I also can’t bear to look at them on someone else’s plate or I’ll lose my appetite. Same goes for crawfish. Ugh. Can’t imagine how either of these things became food! I’m shuddering just thinking about them.
4. Though I now have both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, I didn’t go to university until I was a thirty-year-old, divorced single mother of two little boys. School at that age was so different from how I’d seen it when I was a troubled teen. I valued education in a way I wasn’t able to in high school, and graduated from North Carolina State University top of my class, with a perfect GPA.
5. When I was a recently married 19-year-old, my then-husband, who had joined the US Air Force, was assigned to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. We lived off-base in a little concrete house with a metal roof and bars on the windows. I learned a bit of Tagalog and spent far too much time in the sun without wearing sunscreen (to be fair, it was the 1980s).
6. I’ve been married three times, divorced twice. First marriage was at age eighteen, which is way too young. I don’t regret it, though, as it led to my having my two excellent sons when I was in my twenties. My second marriage was perhaps the regrettable one. (Apparently, I learn best by trial and error!) The man who is my final husband was one of my English and Creative Writing professors. We married fifteen years after I was first his student.
7. After writing my first (never-published) novel and having it rejected by scores of agents, I came very close to returning to university with a plan to become either an anaesthesiologist or a physician assistant. What pointed me, instead, at a master’s degree in fine arts/creative writing was a phone call from one agent who, although she wasn’t offering representation, wanted me to know that my writing was very good and could be made better, if I was willing to put in the work it would take. I was. My seventh novel is being published in June, 2022.
