About Me — Leah Welborn

1.) I was born near the end of the Nixon administration — perhaps that’s what set me off on the wrong foot. It was a few days before Christmas in 1972 when I made my debut in Austin, Texas, the only child of my parents’ union and the only child my mother would ever have. My father had a daughter from a previous marriage, but I wouldn’t find out about her for years; always the victim, he claimed he’d been driven away from her by the child’s mother and her family. Whatever the truth, his barely contained rage and rampant mental illness made everything about him difficult and ugly to me. My mother and I lived on a floor of eggshells as my father glowered at us from the other side of the house, forever bemoaning his fate and targeting one or the other of us for special disdain. I was ecstatic when my parents split up, but the lack of a father has been a painful wound to bear. I’ve not always handled it well.

2.) The first thing that I knew about myself was that I was a writer. My earliest memories are of copying letters from a printed alphabet template into my Big Chief pad of pulpy paper. I couldn’t break the code, and it was exasperating. Why would some combinations of marks carry with them meaning when others wouldn’t? Painstakingly, with my jumbo pencil gripped in my sweaty little left hand, I’d recreate the letters, crammed together in whimsical combinations, one small child’s search for meaning.