Aloha and Welcome

Jess Markley here! I’m a junior in college, a lover of books, a writer of stories, and a follower of Jesus. In the past, I’ve used this blog as a, ah, dumping ground of sorts for the things God’s been teaching me while at college. No particular order of thoughts, or accountability to y’all, the all-stars who read this thang.

So we’re gonna shake things up. Bear with me, okay? Cool.

Ever since I was tiny I’ve loved to read and write. Some of my earliest memories are snuggling on the couch with my mom, my brother on her other side and a book spread across her lap. Every night before bed, she would read aloud to us. (A Bargain for Francis was one of my personal favorites. Shout out to you, Mom, for reading that book at least two dozen times.) For years she read to us. I was probably thirteen before she stopped. My dad would make up bedtime tales for us, too, turning his own favorite novels into kid-friendly renditions. I was in my late teens when I found out Dr. Moreau was NOT a good guy. The two of them soaked my childhood in a steady stream of stories, and it’s shaped my entire life.

If you want your kids to grow up strong and healthy and lost in their own dream world, start them on a solid diet of stories. I devoured words every night, books propped up on my skinny little legs, cover thrown over my head to hide the beam of my flashlight. I snacked on stories during class. My book would peek out of my desk so I could read rather than do our math worksheets. In the summer, after getting kicked outside to go play, I’d spin around on our tire swing, one hand on the rope, the other holding whatever novel I was currently dining on.

Writing came naturally after that. My head was so full of words and adventures and tales that my fingers itched to write, else I would explode. I’d sit at a little table in our basement, scribbling stories of talking owls and lost mice and young detectives and cunning girls turned spies who all looked and sounded suspiciously like me. When I couldn’t write, I imagined. In my head, I had many names and many titles. I was a ship captain, a chef, an orphan, an explorer. Long car trips would turn into carriage rides, where I, a reluctant princess, would get hijacked by marauders only to join their crew of bandits. Boring days at school became training sessions for my future as a fighter pilot. Even if I couldn’t get lost in a book I could get lost in my head.

But disappearing into other worlds doesn’t always work. Somethings in life wake you up. It's like a crying toddler, flipping on the lights at four in the morning, wailing that they just threw up as they insistently tap your face with their tiny finger. And you can’t bury your head in your pillow and roll over back to sleep, no matter how much you want to. You have to face the throw-up of life. You have to get up. So that’s the goal of this blog. I want to talk about waking up, and how, yeah, sometimes that’s a good thing. I want to tell some stories about life– as a writer, a reader, a Jesus-lover, a certified sleep-lover (where my narcoleptics at?), and so on. I want to talk about growing up in books, about the struggles of writing, and the constant battle to look like Jesus when, man, sometimes I just don’t wanna. And don't get me wrong, I'm not sharing this with y'all because I'm some rockstar writer, or model citizen, or secret genius. But because life is weird and hard and funny, and hearing and sharing that stuff with other people is… good.

I’m excited for what this will look like, and I hope you guys are too. And if you enjoy it, stick around, shoot me an email, subscribe, whateva!

Thanks for reading, y’all!

--Jess