About Me, the Obstacles I’ve Faced, and Why I’m Passionate About Writing My name is Peggy Young, and I am from Gadsden, Tennessee, a small town where everyone knows your name, your mama’s name, and probably your business too. It’s the kind of place that molds you, not so much that you’re aware of it, until you sit down to write, and you notice that everything you write has a little bit of the soil of that place on it somehow. I was raised in a middle-class household that was good at stretching a dollar. We were not poor, but we were not comfortable to the point where we could forget that money was an issue either. There were times when the ends were met, barely, and there were times when my parents had to work harder than they should have had to simply to keep things going. What I learned from all of this was not bitterness or resentment, but resourcefulness, the knowledge that you don’t wait until the conditions are perfect to create something, but rather create with what you have, where you are, right now, and that is a lesson that has followed me into all of the writing that I have ever attempted to do. I am the first person in my family to attend college. Let that sink in for a second. Because it took me a while to let it sink in for myself. Being the first comes with a certain kind of pressure. Yes, it is a proud feeling. Absolutely. But it also means you're in a place where it wasn't necessarily designed for someone like you, where there wasn't someone who came before you who said this is what it's like, this is what you're supposed to do, this is what you're not supposed to do. That sense of not fully belonging – of being between two worlds – is something I’ve had to carry with me for a while now. Too educated for some rooms, not polished enough for others. From a small town in a world that often values big-city credentials. First-generation in spaces that often feel designed for legacy. Writing was the place where none of this mattered. Not the place I came from, not the place I was worthy of being – simply the place I had to tell the truth. And telling the truth is what I do. I write poetry because some feelings are too precise for ordinary sentences. I write nonfiction because the real world – the actual, complicated, beautiful, painful real world – is more interesting than anything I could invent. I write journalism because people deserve accurate information delivered with care. And I write content because good writing, regardless of form, has the power to move someone from confusion to clarity, from indifference to action. But what ties all of this together is this: I like to write. Not the end result, not the praise that sometimes goes along with it, but the actual process. The hunt for the right word. The moment when the sentence finally says what you meant to say in the first place. The way the paragraph can change and suddenly breathe. This has gotten me through all the rejections, all the blank pages, and all the moments of self-doubt when I wondered if someone like me had the right to call themselves a writer at all. She does. I do. I write because Gadsden, Tennessee gave me stories worth telling. Because my family gave me the grit to keep going when it’s hard.