"Please Include a Bio of 200-300 Words"
An introduction of sorts, some musings on the distillation of ourselves into stand-alone adjectives and nouns ("tall! decaf! cappuccino!"), and the launch of a new venture.
I keep a running collection of bios in my Google Docs. (Most of that sentence would have been incomprehensible a hundred years ago. Funny.) Almost every time I submit something to an online publication, I’m prompted to submit a short blurb about myself, and I like to a) keep track of what I’ve said about myself in previously rejected submissions (heh) and b) save myself from having to do the same tedious work over and over again. Because, as it turns out, condensing who you are and what you have to say into three or four tidy sentences is a bit of a hard slog.
Especially when you have to do it in third person. I don’t know how Laura Ingalls Wilder stayed sane. (Well, actually, I do: her daughter Rose actually did most of the grunt work behind the Little House on the Prairie books. Also, Christopher Plummer didn’t do his own singing in The Sound of Music. Follow me for more childhood magic ruined.)
In my quest for the perfect encapsulation of a writer’s personality as well as succinct summary of what they write about, I’ve encountered some splendid examples. There’s the fun-insight-into-the-writer’s-life type (“Serial memoirist Eve O. Schaub lives with her family in Vermont and enjoys performing experiments on them so she can write about it”), the quirky-fun-fact-without-revealing-too-much type (“The already dangerous pile of reading material on her nightstand grows daily,” from the back cover of Kate Albus’ A Place to Hang the Moon), and the don’t-ask-this-writer-to-ever-come-up-with-another-bio-again type (“She died in 1972,” said by someone else of Betty Smith on the back of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn).
So with all this in mind, and constantly trying to avoid the tiresome trope of just throwing a bunch of nouns and adjectives in the reader’s face (wife! mom! writer!) I’ve collected the following sundry snippets:
“Amy Colleen is a returning student taking classes part-time (with an eye to finishing her bachelor's degree within the next five years) while being a full-time stay-at-home parent.”
“In her spare time, she enjoys reading novels, sewing historical clothing, and employing the Oxford comma whenever possible.”
“She is the mother of two boys, a part-time student of creative writing, and a reader of at least four books at any given time.”
“Jane Austen aficionado, not above re-reading Beverly Cleary for the 80th time.”
“Amy Colleen has written creative nonfiction for The Memoirist, P.S. I Love You, and Pregnant Chicken. Her humor pieces have been published in Frazzled and The Belladonna Comedy.”
“Mom to two, wife to one, and book owner to 400 (give or take).”
“Once rode a police horse down Pennsylvania Avenue.”
“Will turn anything into a Jane Austen reference.”
(That last one is a little too accurate.)
When I was trying to brainstorm ideas for this introduction post—a landing place for new readers, a reorientation for old—I kept thinking of that scene in You’ve Got Mail where Joe Fox writes to Kathleen Kelly,
“The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are, can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall! Decaf! Cappuccino!”
I worked as a barista for a year when I was finishing a community college certificate (Administrative Office Management, if you care—don’t worry, no one does, it’s very boring) but I’ve never found a sense of self in any of the drinks I brewed. It’s a lot to ask from a cup of coffee (which definitely doesn’t cost $2.95 as it did a quarter of a century ago) and it’s a lot to ask from a brief summary of a person that will fit under a byline, too.
I can make a cute graphic to describe this newsletter with the tagline “life, literature, and the pursuit of hilarity” (I’m actually pretty proud of that, thanks); I can say I love to read literary fiction and historical fiction and old-fashioned detective stories; I can tell you my kids are three years old and nine months old right now, and they’re my whole world and also the reason I’m starting to go gray; I can put together a carefully curated sentence about my favorite nerdy grammar rules and the memes I make on my phone while I’m up late nursing a cranky baby, but none of that is going to tell you what makes me tick and why anything I write is worth your time. (I don’t know that it is, if we’re being honest here. That’s for you to decide.)
I can’t distill everything about me and everything about my writing into an About Me And About My Writing page. Shoot, I can’t put everything I’ve lived and seen and thought and done into a whole essay. But I hope you will choose to come along for the ride and read my patched-together writings anyway; I hope you’ll find something that sits well with you, that makes you laugh, that helps you feel connected to another person just doing her best every day and messing up a lot of the time and trying to make a joke out of it that would be worthy of the patronage of the esteemed Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
I have been writing this newsletter for two years now. And I’ve finally decided to turn on the paid subscriptions feature.
THE FREE VERSION IS NOT GOING AWAY.
I had to put that part in all caps so that no one would get scared. Although maybe the fact that it was in all caps seemed too much like shouting and someone did get scared. Sorry.
I just want to be clear that 99% of my posts/emails/essays/newsletters/whatever you want to call them are still going to be completely free and available to everyone. I am simply enabling a feature that will allow those who want to support me with a small Pecuniary Emolument to do so. If I were the Father of the Marshalsea I would call it a small testimonial. I would have liked to make it a total pay-what-you-will but because of Substack fees and such the minimum I could set was $5/month. If you would like to become a paid subscriber you can do so by opening this post in a browser window and clicking the little button at the top right where it says “upgrade to paid.”
Once you click on that you will see the paid subscription options:
And if you decide to stick with the free version you can still do that! Just select “none.” I know it says this only includes “occasional” public posts but my posts will still almost all be public. Anyone who chooses to be a paid member is doing so out of the goodness of their heart and because they want to be a patron of the arts, not because they’ll be accessing special secret material the rest of you won’t be able to see!
Whether you choose to upgrade or not (and I promise I won’t be annoying about that!) I’m very grateful you’re here. The fact that you chose to click on this piece, in a World Wide Web full of distractions and more important things, means a lot to me. Thank you.
Do you know what I always manage to include in every bio I write?
This.
I mention this Substack and I drop a link to it. Because it’s so important to me. It’s my cozy corner, my at-home writing place, my most favorite byline. And it will continue to be so, for as long as I can continue writing silly little things and as long as Mrs. Henry Dashwood (the elder) endures—for people always live forever when there is an annuity to be paid them.
Thank you for enduring with me.
Ha ha, I just love how your mind works, Amy! This is such a fun and informative post – and good on you for adding the paid option.
I think the deceased Mr. Dashwood was Henry, though?
I had to come up with a bio when I had a stint on the executive board of my professional association a decade and a half ago. I was tired of reading bios extolling accomplishments, so I submitted this:
“Tim is a Northern California native who changed his major three times, went to four different colleges, and took six years to get a bachelor’s degree in a subject he’s never been called upon to use professionally.”
I haven’t written a new bio since.