Victoria Clayton

As a nine-year-old, I spent one stifling Midwestern summer practicing my hula hooping skills under a large oak tree. I was perfecting my ability to make the purple-and-white hoop travel from my forehead to my ankles and back up and down, up and down.

Moms loyal to Young & The Restless and Phil Donahue populated my neighborhood. The dads, at least the lucky ones, worked at John Deere Tractor Works. Imagine: potholes, barking dogs chained to scratched-up front doors and beat-up pickups parked askew.

One afternoon my across-the-street neighbor returned from his shift at John Deere and unraveled a green hose. Shirtless, freshly showered at the factory, dark hair politely parted to one side, he watered his lawn. Over the next few weeks, he painted his house turquoise. He planted flowers and embedded large wooden wagon wheels in snow-white rock. Then, in a final act that caused me to stop hooping in mid rotation, he took out a brush and painted dark green vertical lines between the cinder blocks of his home’s foundation. Though I hadn’t been to the ocean, seen the Eifel Tower or even the inside of an art museum yet, I recognized passion and inspiration when I saw it. I stopped hooping altogether; I’d already mastered the move anyhow.

To some, my neighbor’s improvements were eccentric. To me, they were brave and had to be noted. I did the only thing I could: I picked up a pen. A loyal Weekly Reader subscriber, I already appreciated the magazine form. My neighbor’s story would fill the feature well in my hand-made magazine.

Though now I'm often called a journalist/fiction writer/author, I consider myself a content enhancer or a sentence sculptor. Because, quite simply, stories already exist. It’s merely the writer’s job to record and mold them. I’ve contributed to TheAtlantic.com, Barrelhouse, The Los Angeles Times and Times magazine, The Orange County Register, MSNBC.com and many other places. I’m platform agnostic. My work could come in the form of a print or online article, a book, a blog post, a research paper, a piece of fiction or an email newsletter. The subject could be academic writing or my family. It might be a celebrity, a swank spa, a parenting trend, the latest breakthroughs in diabetes research, the best running shoes or the psychology behind renting storage space. But really everything is about this: transformation, possibility and courage.