Jena M. Steinmetz
I was a weird kid.
Okay....maybe weird is the wrong word. Hmmmm....let's try this again.
My childhood—in the suburbs of Philadelphia—was idealistic and cliché filled, but I was an overtly-creative child.
Yes, that's better.
My friends' parents have told me from a very young age that I had an "old soul" and was probably born in the wrong decade. While my counterparts were busy playing video games, listening to the latest 90's Pop music and salivating over boy-band members, I was begging my father to take me to see the Beatles (he didn't have the heart to tell me they were no longer together), obsessing over old movies, and creating elaborate games for my friends and I to play in the street. I acquired my love of reading from my mother, who frequently took us to the library on weekends and over summer vacation—partly because they had air conditioning. My three sisters would moan and complain, but I'd lose myself among the racks of books and was never able to leave with just one. Before I knew what copyrights and plagiarism were, I tended to morph the stories I salivated over into something of my own. It became my favorite party trick: turning a story I read into a short play my sisters and I could perform for my parent's friends.
It wasn't until much later that I realized I could write my own stories; take the worlds and character my dreams were comprised of and weave them into something unique and very much my own.
So then I started writing—in secret journals that I hid under my mattress and any spare paper I could find. I adapted motifs from my favorite authors and tried to emulate their styles. I wanted to be Tolkien, Rowling, and Baum; create fantastic worlds of fantasy and imagination, where nothing was too outlandish. But my stories were always kept very tight to my chest, as I was too embarrassed to admit what I was doing behind closed doors.
Then there was a turning point; a distinct memory that I can still recall from 8th grade. My English teacher asked—very innocently after reading one of my book reports—if I ever thought about being a writer. Just one question, with a pinch of validation, sent me down—what I realize now—a destined trajectory. And I started writing: I wrote my first one act play when I was 13—and saw it performed by my high school when I was 17—I was chosen as a finalist for the Pennsylvania Governor's School of Excellence for Creative Writing, had feature articles published in the Bucks County Herald and the Lehigh Valley Morning Call, and excelled in my given major—English/Creative Writing—and graduated cum laude from DeSales University.
It was in college that my dreams came to fruition; I started my first novel, based on my grandfather's WWII memoirs. And three years later, I had the honor of handing my grandfather the first published copy.
What was once a secret passion has now been pushed to the forefront of my life, and this "old soul" has no intentions of stopping.