About
I’ve spent my whole life noticing patterns. Taking notes.
What I’ve noticed is this: we are walking and working and living and loving inside a world that is responsive and supportive of our wild joy. (I’ll explain what I mean by that inside the pages of these projects. So many projects.)
I made this library because ever since I was little my happy place was libraries and bookstores. My mom and I used to walk down Arrandale Avenue to the little brick library building right next to the park and my kindergarten building. Once a week, with my little sister in the stroller, we walked up to the glass doors and stepped inside and there was that smell — of old books and paste and something else, musty and a little sweaty salty but in all the good ways. We went down to the lower level where the children’s department was and I was set free among the stacks. Mom would sit and read or bounce Beth on her knee and I went off and came back with the titles I discovered. I was allowed to choose ten books each week — and sometimes, if I couldn’t decide, eleven.
Mom was an illustrator and painter and poet. We made books together too — bound them with yarn and staples, drew pictures. I still have some of the children’s books she made for my sisters and me.
I’m Amy Oscar. Recovering Magazine Editor. Yogini. Spiritual memoirist. Someone with too many notebooks and not enough walls.
Begin wherever your curiosity leads you.
My first job to my last included writing. Even when I was a systems analyst, an office manager, a seminar leader, a legal temp — the only job that didn’t involve writing was waitressing. And even then I was writing every night when I got home. On a Selectric typewriter my mom gave me in high school.
At my first real writing job I wrote blurbs for blue paperbacks in the basement of our local variety store. In college, I wrote my way into an exchange program in Paris — I didn’t have the grades but my essay got me in. They told me so. I wrote my way through an Ad Comm program and my professor hired me right out of class as an editor for his new magazine.
I wrote parenting essays at my kitchen table and got syndicated across the US. I wrote for Parents, Family Fun, McCall’s. Then I got a job at Woman’s World, where I stayed for fifteen years as Senior Features Editor, editing and ghostwriting thousands of true stories from readers — including a column about angels with two million readers.
Now I am gathering my own stories.
