I don’t know what it is about him—the heavily tattooed, sleek-haired stranger, a self-proclaimed “dirt poet” from Chicago—but he totally disarms me. And so, when he asks about my greatest fear, (following a discussion on his own terrifying experience running with the bulls in Paloma, Spain), I tell him.

“My greatest fear,” I say, uttering aloud the thing that no one else knows, “is also my greatest aspiration. And that is to write a book.” I explain that I want to publish. Red-faced, I confess that fear of failure has kept me from even starting.

My houseguest cocks his head, clasps his hands together. He points his intertwined index fingers toward me and very earnestly speaks.

“Hänni,” says the man sitting adjacent, “if you are scared of something, then that’s exactly why you need tackle it head-on.” His liquid dark eyes flash as he admonishes my trepidation. He tells me if I’m scared of something, I need to run up to it full speed and smash it’s metaphorical teeth out. “For all the night’s it’s kept you awake,” he explains. “For all the nights it’s stolen your sleep.”

I nod my head, yes, the truth of his words stirring in my stomach. The man touches his hand to the back of his neck, exposes a riot of black ink scrawled on caramel-colored flesh. He switches gears, tells me he’s enjoying his speakings in the south, and thanks me for letting him crash on my sofa. He is grateful, he says for the opportunity to tour and promote his second self-published book, a work of non-fiction called A Life Deliberate. I tell him it’s no problem, and I’m grateful as well, to have the ear of an author, if just for the evening.

As I lay myself to sleep that night, my duo of cats purring a lullaby and cuddling in the crook of my arm, I think to myself, if the man on my couch can publish, maybe I can too.

Something warm flutters in my guts. It feels like butterflies. It feels like hope.

—-
For three years I had houseguest and author, Chris Gutierrez’ words bubbling in my brain. But it wasn’t until New Years 2010 that I finally resolved to Write! Write! Write!—to step into uncertainty and experiment with longer-form literary pieces; the kind of stuff you don’t post on a blog, but that you see in magazines and journals and as parts of a larger book-length work. To this end, I enrolled in an Inprint! writer’s workshop. This experience, it turns out, would further ignite my writing passions, and soon I would wake at 5AM on workdays so I could bang out some prose on my MacBook before heading to the office. Days I slept in, I missed my writing ritual, felt it’s loss like a phantom limb.

I’ve decided I want to publish. I’ve decided to smash fear straight in the face and give writing a serious shot. I don’t know what will happen if I do, but I’m fairly certain of what happens if I don’t, and that’s not the kind of regret I want to live with.

Next steps? The Taos Summer Writers’ Conference—It’s not inexpensive, but it is, I think, an opportunity I can’t miss. Here’s hoping that out there—in the desert place that nourished artists like Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence, and Georgia O’ Keeffe—there’s some New Mexican magic for me as well.