hello blogging world! my name is Leah, and I created this wordpress for all things writing; first and foremost, poetry, but fiction, literal blog posts, book reviews and music projects may pop up in the future as well. I want to use this blog for anything that has to do with words in any way.

a little about me: I’m 24 years old, have lived in the Skagit Valley for two years and will soon be returning to Bellingham for the summer. in March of this year I graduated from Western Washington University with a degree in English with a Creative Writing emphasis. but before that, I was a math major. and before that, I was a German major at Seattle Pacific University. my path to writing has been stilted, and it took four years of floundering through college, and before that many years of secret poems and late night urges, to finally come to writing.

after dropping out of SPU in 2011, I hopped a plane to Alaska to make some quick cash, and then moved to Bellingham. I worked full time and in spring of 2012 returned to school, taking core English and math classes at Whatcom Community College. during one of my final quarters at WCC I enrolled in a creative writing class, and everything changed.

being in that class, surrounded by fellow weirdos who loved to write, made me realize that maybe there was another kind of home waiting for me. a home I could make through writing. I submitted to WCC’s spring poetry contest, the Kumquat Challenge, and my poem “dream/memory” won first place in the current student category.

it took another year of struggling through offshoots of calculus and transferring to Western for me to realize that what I was doing wasn’t right. when it came time to declare my major, I made the decision to change, and officially began studying English. my final six quarters of college were made up almost entirely of English classes, which I will be forever grateful for.

I’ve been writing my whole life, but it took taking a chance on myself and realizing that my words do  have power to make writing into my priority and my lifeblood. I graduated from Western March 19^th, 2016, cum laude, with a bachelor’s degree in English, and I don’t think I’ll ever regret making the choice to study and become better at the one thing I love in this life, the one thing I truly feel good at.