An Autobiography as Brief as a Candle Flame

I began writing way back in the Dim Regions of Weir, called the teenage years, bad poetry and no prose. Somewhere in my twenties, after reading Raymond Carver, I decided I could also write short stories. So I wrote bad poetry and bad prose for years, but, slowly, like a bird wearing down a mountain with its beak, I began to teach myself this solitary occupation. Stubborn as the will of kings, I listened to few teachers, preferring to go my own merry way, even if wrong, even if embarrassing. Then, in mid-life, I developed a strange malady called either Agoraphobia or Panic Syndrome or Social Anxiety Disease, depending on which nabob you were talking to. Suddenly - as if hit by lunatic lightning - I was cut off from the workaday world. Into therapy I went, and, if it didn't cure my dis-ease, it opened me up in ways I had not foreseen. In the past five years I've written more and better than in the previous 25. In a very real sense, my words go out into humankind for me.