How The Lush Lit Life Started

Writing has always been my original dream and the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do. Since the first time I let my mind wander on paper during my elementary school days, I’ve dreamed about being a professional writer. In high school, I took my first creative writing class, and by senior year, I was the editor of the school’s literary magazine, and I had won local and state awards for my writing. 

Other than my dream of writing, something else has followed me as I have tried to establish myself in a career. I’ve always had a fear of what would happen to me if my dreams fell through, so I always felt an obligation to myself and others to do something that would be considered practical. 

This fear driven need for practicality is why I spent a good portion of my time thinking that I was only a journalist. I saw journalism as a way to live my writer dream while being in a career that was concrete and practical enough for others to understand and approve of. I majored in journalism for my first two years at Hampton University, but I changed my major during my sophomore year to English Education.  I was convinced that I wasn’t cut out for journalism after not being selected for an internship at my hometown newspaper in Greensboro. Yet again, I chose my second major out of a desire to combine my dreams with grounded practicality, and what is more practical than a career as an English teacher. 

I can’t say that my switch to majoring in English was inspired totally out of a desire to stay safe. I was drawn to literature classes that allowed me to read poetry, fiction and essays that I would have had to skip if I had remained a journalism major. I was a few steps closer to my real purpose as a writer, but not quite there. 

My dream started to change. Instead of dreaming of becoming a noted journalist, I started to dream of teaching children my favorite literary works during the day and coming home in the evenings to work on my own writing. A few months after I graduated from college, I had my first teaching job as a 6th grade English/Language Arts teacher back in my hometown.

That was my first and last year teaching K-12 school. The pressure from all of the grading, staying hours after school to get work done, parent-teacher conferences, and lack of support pushed me to the point that I cried every morning before going to work. Teaching was nothing like the dream I had back in college, and I definitely never had time to write. 

I’ve always found solace and refuge in books, and during this period, I found a book called Sacred Pampering Principles: An African-American Woman’s Guide to Self-Care and Inner Renewal by Debrena Jackson Gandy. This book made me question what my true passions were, and I was led back to journalism. My dream morphed again, and I could see myself as a magazine editor at one of the New York “glossies”.  I decided to go to graduate school for journalism, and I applied to seven schools before being accepted into Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Public Communication. 

After Syracuse, I interned at a women’s business magazine in Atlanta. I also started freelance writing for a hair care magazine, so I was on track to do the usual series of internships combined with freelancing that most magazine journalists do before they land their first full time position. This was 2009 though, and I was a fresh graduate from a journalism school right after a major recession and a collapse of the traditional journalism industry. I again faltered to practicality, and instead of finding a way to move to New York via another unpaid internship, I moved back to North Carolina and resumed teaching as a substitute teacher. I still freelanced for a few publications, and I started to toy with blogging.

In addition to substitute teaching for the K-12 school system, I started substituting at the local community college in the developmental English department. Eventually, I was assigned my own classes, and I taught developmental English and reading classes for three years until I went back to graduate school for library studies on a full ride scholarship. After I graduated from library school, I started to work full time as a reference librarian at the same community college where I had taught.

My life seemed like it was finally leveling out, except for the fact that the position I had taken right after library school was temporary. I searched for nine months for permanent positions before being offered one at a community college in Jacksonville, NC, which is a military town on the edge of North Carolina toward the coast. It was 3 and a half hours from my family and my hometown. Librarianship is something I never intended to do, and now it had taken me to a strange town where I felt extremely isolated  since I had nothing to do with the military. I wondered how I had gotten so far off the track I was once on. My writing dream started to feel like it was slipping away, and my expensive journalism degree started to feel like a waste of time.

During my long drives home from Jacksonville, I would listen to podcasts, which would make the drudgery of driving so long a lot more bearable. I listened to Myleik Teele, Rosetta Thurman, and other women’s business podcasts. I listened to Alex Elle’s Hey Girl podcast. I started to admire personal style influencers like Mattie James and Kim Postell of NaturallyFashionable who told their stories of how they built their dream careers from starting with a Wordpress and a plan. I also started to be inspired by creatives on social media like Ashely Coleman of Permission to Write and Alisha Roberson, who now runs Living Over Existing. I also started to think about women writers who I’ve always looked up to that started writing careers later in their lives, like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. I was so inspired that I decided to take my writing career in my own hands and at 35, I self published my first collection of poetry, Fast Girls Wear Loud Colors. It was then that I realized that all this time, I was mistaken about being solely a journalist. 

I am a poet. I am a storyteller. I am a teacher. I am a researcher. I am an artist. And yeah, there’s a little bit of journalist in me too.

During the time since I took the first step toward my writing career by publishing my poetry collection, my work has been adapted to music by a group called The Damselfly Trio, and they have performed songs based on my work across North Carolina and even in Ireland. 

I currently live in Morrisville, NC, and I’m still an academic librarian, but I’ve grown to appreciate how compatible the profession is to a writing life. I’m also working on my second book, a verse novel. 

Everything I’ve gone through put a passion in me to help other women writers like me who may feel like their chances to write have passed. I’m creating a community for women who are 35 and over so they don’t have to feel like they are alone in their writing dreams. This community will include the support, the resources, and the encouragement that I wished I had. Despite the twists and turns in my journey, I’ve learned that it’s not too late to have a writing life on my terms, according to my Christian faith and my sense of authentic self. I want to show women like me a pathway to their own writing lives that they never thought existed.

Find out more about Nichole O. Nichols from her website, NicholeONichols.com.

Follow @NicholeONichols On Instagram!