Unexpected validation — eeee! ;)

I recently had something startlingly nice happen to me! There’s a professor I had in the past who’s a noted and accomplished author. She’s got enough prose and literature out that I always found her somewhat… not quite intimidating to talk to, but not easy to chat with. It’s not her fault at all, of course — she’s one of the most friendly, approachable, and helpful women writers I’ve ever met — if not the most so. She’s the one who told me I was brilliant enough that I should continuously challenge myself, in fact.

She even shared one time that she still gets butterflies in her stomach when she steps up to the microphone to speak or read at events she’s invited to. It’s just that… well, there’s something a little awe-inspiring about a woman who can casually mention that she first realized she must be famous… when she was in Europe and saw a line from one of her poems translated into that language and scrawled as graffiti across one of the arches of a stone bridge there.

So yeah: hugely impressed and inspired by her. So you can perhaps imagine my shock and pleasure at hearing from a friend that she was so pleased to finally meet this woman… and as they were chatting about people they both knew, my name came up — and this accomplished, brilliant, heartrendingly evocative author said (with apologies to my failure of absolutely precise memory due to the aforementioned shock and pleasure), “Oh, Collie! Yes, I know her — she’s a great writer!”