A Bit About Me And Writing



My name is Erin Tajime Castelan. 

Writing is one of my deeply enjoyed, creative passions. Along with painting or building things, I love to write.  

I am a long-time, free-form, stream-of-consciousness journal writer since I was nine in fourth grade.  I do well with the rawness of expression, yet, struggle with acquiring engaging form and good grammar.  I am on a steep learning curve to acquire a clear understanding of conventional form. It is something that does not naturally occur to me, yet I am dedicated to learning in order to be read and understood well.  


Writing has been an important vehicle for me to more carefully collect my thoughts and express myself since a brain breakdown in 1989 robbed me of cognitive function, and the easy flow of spoken conversing.  


Writing helped me restore lost cognitive abilities in which speaking and expressing were stilted; interrupted by intense stuttering, forgotten words, and moments of complete memory loss – when I lost what I was saying mid-sentence and might never recover it.

 

In order to have support, I joined a few writing groups in the nineties, one, in particular, had a focus on writing submissions to The Sun Magazine’s “Reader’s Write” section.  


I had a few articles published in different magazines and periodicals since 1995. And began focussing on and taking memoir writing classes with Laura Davis in Santa Cruz, in 2000.  


I also attended various writing classes at Stanford, workshops through WOW (Women on Writing) at Skyline College, and with Ann Randolph, Eanlai Cronin. And I have attended a number of different weekly or monthly writing practice groups for many years including “Jump Start” on Saturday mornings led by Greg Kimura, who has since passed away.


Though I have mostly written in-depth on a number of very traumatic experiences for my own evolution and healing, which helps me more clearly how experiences shaped me, I also see others might benefit from reading my stories and discovering my perspective… and what I did to survive and carry on, after incredibly daunting setbacks. 


I do at times write about embarrassing moments with a frank sense of unapologetic humor. Much of my life is oriented around love, romantic partnership, and the quirky ways people behave or fall into misunderstanding and upset and recover… or not. 


My parents raised us five kids to be fiercely independent, which shows in the choices I made in taking daring risks to travel alone and rarely seeking help even when I desperately needed it. 


I hope my memoir stories might offer a glimpse of hope to others.



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