Their mini-marshmallow stature and pre-intellectual chatter marked them as targets: those undersized, over-bright kids who get stuffed into lockers by eighth graders. Cassie made beeping noises. Talia talked so fast that the ends of sentences tumbled out ahead of the beginnings. Cami, one of only two seventh graders, smirked at both the chatty sixth graders and the only slightly less chatty adult: me. But during our eight-week Lighthouse Young Writers Workshop, I discovered they would all survive, because they’d learned to sublimate the horror of middle school by pouring it into creative writing.

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This Thursday, I’m traveling to a place that should have yellow caution tape around it. According to the news, according to family and friends, according to the U.S. State Department, if I’m looking for danger: non-essential travel to Chihuahua, Mexico is the way to go, especially Ciudad Juárez. When I told my grandfather I was going to Mexico to do research for my historical novel, he shouted a bit, then insisted, “OK, next subject.” But hey, sometimes Grampa shouts when he and Dad are deciding where to grab breakfast on Sunday, so I didn’t take it personally.

According to the U.S. State Department, if I’m looking for danger: non-essential travel to Chihuahua, Mexico is the way to go, especially Ciudad Juárez.

I’ll only be in Juárez for a day and a half of my five-day round-trip from El Paso to Casas Grandes. Don’t tell my husband, but I’m more scared about the twelve hours I’ll be on a Mexican highway. I plan to hide a couple hundred bucks in my shoe, in case I need to pay off highway robbers. Remember when our parents used to say, “That’s highway robbery!” and we thought it was just an expression?

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Perhaps you’ve heard there are only two stories: 1) someone goes on a journey, or 2) a stranger comes to town. So, there’s really only one story, because “a stranger comes to town” is the flip side of “someone goes on a journey.” As a traveler and writer, I appreciate both. When I can’t go on a journey, I love the journey to come to me.

Denver’s Lighthouse LitFest is a two-week exploration of the craft, business, and camaraderie of the writer’s life.

That’s what it is to have Denver’s Lighthouse LitFest “come to town” each year, a two-week exploration of the craft, business, and camaraderie of the writer’s life. That’s what it was to have my friend Elizabeth drive from San Diego to Denver to join me for this June’s LitFest. She’d given me a party and a place to stay during my recent book tour, and I was eager to return the favor, and to share this amazing event with another writer.

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“Awards are fun…” my friend Jen once wrote me in an email. Now I remember that phrase every time I enter a writing contest. It packs an attitude that seems to say, “Go out and play.” I have some fun to report: my non-fiction personal essay has won first place in the Denver Woman’s Press Club In-House Writing Contest. It’s a bit embarrassing to post the essay here, because it is, indeed, quite personal. But writing is communication, and what is communication if it’s not shared? So here’s my story:

SMELLY MAKE THIS BED
by Cara Lopez Lee

I tuck the sheet under my chin and try not to move, hoping to trap it, that smell like spoiled sausage and goat cheese. It’s only a gesture, because already I know it’s too late.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Nice,” he laughs.

“So, this is how love dies,” I say, “one fart at a time.”

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I’ve just finished teaching a Lighthouse Young Writers Workshop at a Denver middle school, and after just eight-weeks I’m already an addict. I’ve discovered that there is as much joy in helping others find their writing voice as there is in expressing my own. Yet I’ll confess that I used to fear middle-schoolers. “They’re all volition, and no control,” I’ve sometimes explained to friends.

There is as much joy in helping others find their writing voice as there is in expressing my own.

I remember middle school as perhaps the most terrifying time in my life: on my first day, a girl I’d never met tossed the contents of my purse around the gym, she laughed at the Kleenex my mom had stuffed inside, as my other personal odds and ends flew overhead from hand to hand. I wondered what power she had, and I lacked, that made a roomful of strangers decide to humiliate me.

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