haley anne hodges

Little kids are known to have high ambitions for their futures. They want to be astronauts, firefighters, princesses, movie stars, professional athletes or something else amazing and unlikely. When I was younger, I wanted to own a grocery store. I didn’t know why but, for some reason, that was my dream. As I grew older, I abandoned that fantasy in favor of something new. My fifth-grade yearbook will tell you that I planned to work with animals but a lack of passion and scientific knowledge ruled that one out fairly quickly. When I was in seventh grade, my oldest sister was applying to colleges and trying to figure out what she wanted to be. While she was visiting colleges, I was hand-writing my first novel in a series of six composition notebooks, usually while watching Rory Gilmore pursue journalism in the Gilmore Girls. I declared that I wanted to study journalism before my sister had picked her major. Maybe it was the competition of beating my sister, a series of great English teachers, or my experience working on yearbook staffs, but that’s the dream that finally stuck. I should have known I would end up writing because I’m a storyteller by nature. During my first written assessments in third grade, I would spin elaborate tales onto the massive-lined paper. Somewhere in my bedroom exists the original copy of Alligator Park, with its many misspelled words and grammar mistakes, that sparked a series of stories by my elementary school self. My best friend and I would act out stories at recess and on playdates as I continued to plan out the lives of the characters. Our fifth-grade yearbook states that she wanted to be an editor and, though she now studies chemical engineering, she and I were the perfect pair of imaginative and practical. I was always the planner, sometimes with overly imaginative plans that she would calm down. In sixth grade, I planned and wrote her murder mystery birthday party with my system of ten color-coordinated folders that I carried with me through months of organization. I can’t claim that the murder mystery was the most brilliant and thought-provoking story, but that experience was perhaps the epitome of what I would pursue later in life. I’m still the planner of the group: I love organizing meetups, events or trips and am trusted to do so within my friend groups. Some things have changed and some have not. I’m now my own editor, dialing back my imagination and producing results. I’m still a writer and still a storyteller. I no longer want to own a grocery store but instead I want to write, somewhere and somehow.