About Me — Judy Walker

A Writing Astronaut.

The author, attempting a selfie at -30 C Below.

I grew up dreaming of becoming an astronaut. My fingers sticky with paper glue, I’d clip newspaper articles about space travel, black and white photographs of the moon and the earth, anything and everything our Soviet comrades shared with us, the Czechs, about their National hero, Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.

I carried around that elastic-wrapped scrapbook in my backpack for years. I wanted to be Yuri Gagarin and circle the Earth. I wanted to explore the unexplored, to see the unseen, and experience the never before experienced.

At thirteen, my wish came true. I landed on another planet.

At least that’s what Canada felt like to me when my family and I immigrated on a frigid January morning in 1980.

The author, as the taciturn teenager the summer after we landed in Canada.

I did not arrive of my own free will. I did not want to live in this vastness that tasted of salt from coast to coast; where my father came home from work covered in coal dust after a twelve-hour shift at the mine; where my mother vacuumed electrical outlets in a motel because her boss insisted she must.