His comment convinced me that I couldn’t write, and the next three years of high school English were agony. I dreaded written assignments, put them off until the last minute, and wrote late into the night right before they were due. (Thank you, Mom, for all that middle-of-the-night typing!)

In 1975 I entered Trinity College in Hartford, CT vowing never to take an English class, and by the time I’d I transferred to Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA in my junior year, I’d figured out how to get around the English requirements by substituting Latin American Literature classes. I loved reading novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other Latin American writers, but I still had to write those darn essays. I finally figured out that if I wrote a lousy first draft, I could improve it by…revising! With this discovery, along with encouragement from my professors, help from friends, and a string of all-nighters, I slowly and painstakingly learned to write a good paper. It was still hard, but I liked expressing my ideas. I even elected in my senior year to research and write an optional 70-page thesis on the women’s movement in Argentina pre-Eva Peron.