About Letitia L. Moffitt

Author

My Story

Ever since my first written story, “The cat with no name,” I’ve always wanted to be a writer. (As I recall, the nameless cat was sad until it found a garbage can full of names from which to choose. Deep stuff for a 6-year-old.) But until very recently, I have never answered the question “What do you do?” with “I’m a writer.” It doesn’t matter than I’m always writing, always thinking up story ideas or considering how to make sense of personal experiences through words on a page. When you say “I’m a writer,” people assume certain things—mainly, that that’s all you do, because you make a lot of money doing it. Writing isn’t the only thing I do, and as for money, as I’ve told my writing students, if you go into writing with the main goal of getting rich, you are very much missing the point.

I do now tell people I’m a writer, which inevitably provokes the follow-up of “What do you write?” And that’s another tricky question, because there are many answers. My latest book is a memoir. The two before that were paranormal suspense. My first was a novel-in-stories with multiple points of view. Personal essay to poetry to post-apocalyptic novella, I’ve written it and seen in published. But saying all of that would be like giving a truthful answer to the question “How are you” instead of just saying “fine,” so I usually just pitch my latest book. I don’t write to get rich, but another potential sale—and another reader—is never a bad thing.

Why don’t I stick to a genre? Well, remember how I said that writing isn’t the only thing I do? The truth is writing may be the only constant in my zig-zaggy, ever-self-reinvented life. I was born and raised in Hawaii. My parents came from opposite ends of the earth. I went to school in northern California. I worked in New York City. I went back to school in upstate New York and got a job in central Illinois. I’ve traveled, mostly alone, from Bangkok to Benidorm. I’ve worked for a big Wall Street investment bank and a small business—the smallest possible, a company consisting of just me. I’ve lived in an East Village apartment and a rural farmhouse slightly west of the middle of nowhere. I’ve run marathons and raised parrots. And I’ve written about all of it.

Yet I don’t necessarily consider myself a bold, adventurous person, certainly not all the time. I’m terribly introverted and social-phobic; I cringe at the thought of noise and crowds. And there are other things about me, private things I don’t like to talk about much. Depression may seem like a commonplace malady nowadays, but it took me decades to admit there was something seriously impaired in my ability to feel good about anything. All this, too, I’ve written about, as hard as it was.

The gist is that whenever I take those personality quizzes—not the bogus ones aimed at data-mining but the slightly more comprehensive and marginally legit ones—nothing conclusive turns up. My answers are all over the place. And I like that about me. I like that there’s little I won’t try, few people I can’t connect with, nothing that won’t interest me in some way that I can experience and write about—and you can read about. So keep reading; there’s always more to come.

Letitia

P.S. I couldn’t figure out how to finish “The cat with no name” so I left it unfinished with the cat’s discovery. Seems fitting: abundant possibilities instead of a definitive decision, and a story that doesn’t have an ending.

Now Available

Bird People

Memoir

Meet Letitia

Urbana, Illinois, June 26 at 7 p.m.