I wanted to bring something with me to the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference in August for the "consignment table" where workshop leaders and attendees put out a few of their books for sale. I looked through my small personal catalog of works and decided to take a book of poetry called A Space Between Rains, and maybe a little chapbook titled Inchworms.

The chapbook was something I had sort-of thrown together in 2014 as a birthday gift for a writer friend, and never expected to publish. Besides writing, my friend was a full-time student and working part-time too, a very busy young man. His thank you, a few days later, was the best compliment I've ever received as a writer. He said, "I didn't have time to read it, so I decided to just read one story. And I read the whole book, all the way to the end."

So this year, searching for something "good enough" for the conference, I came back to the little booklet. Since then, more stories and poems have been added, and it has morphed into a viable book, with a cover blurb that says: "a lively little flea-market of a book..." (A true definition of a chapbook, surely.) There are some stories that are blithe and happy, but also some that are deeper and dark.

This is not intended to be brilliant literature. Its essence is sometimes sweet and funny, often philosophical between the lines, and wiser than it seems. The title story is about a little girl, three years old, observing and describing an inchworm, a tiny green creature she finds in the chicken yard that is her backyard in North Carolina. She tells us about it, sharing her love of it with us. One page long, the story is simply a very young mind discovering the life around her. In later pages as she grows and sees more, the stories and poems do too. That's it. That's all it is.

This morning I realized that this is what we are all doing as writers, no matter what genre. We are observing life, discovering events and meanings, always more intimately, more vastly, and more truly, and we are inspired – no, compelled – to share what we have discovered. We want to shout from the mountaintop: "Wow - Look at this! This is Who We Are! This is what Life Is! Isn't it marvelous? Isn't it terrible? Wonderful, painful, joyous, profound, magnificent? To BE here and be alive, discovering it all?"

That's what writers do. And somewhere hidden in a deep place the world can't pry into, we know that this is what we came here to do: to discover life and share it by telling it. With or without worldly recognition or reward, we write.

(You can read this story via this link: http://w2w.victoriachames.com/inchwormsbeta.html) or visit my Writers' Blog, Writer To Writer  via:  http://writer2writer.victoriachames.com