Welcome! My name is Carmen Bowes and I am a West Virginian, bred and buttered.

I have been writing for as long as I can remember. Tiny bits of poetry (I'm not a poet) burst from my small fingers. I painted the words on big pieces of paper to give to my mom or my brother or whoever happened to be near. I took high school elective classes with intense workloads of both reading and creative writing, more inclined to do that work than the work that needed done.

I spent a lot of my first few years of college pretending I wanted to do something else and then landed on English anyways. I studied complex texts, desperately distilling out what was good. I took one creative writing class in my undergrad, it wasn't even supposed to be creative. It was meant to be technical writing but a rogue adjunct decided it should be a creative course and no one complained. I took on heavy, weird, and far too honest(is there such a thing?) subjects from my life. I wrote sex scenes and abuse down on the pages and let my peers read and critique my moments. It was perfect.

But, writing is an impossible career path. You'll never make it, kid, I thought as I graduated and fast entered the "What now?!" stage of my 20s. If you can't do, teach. right? I tried that, it is hard, much harder than doing.

In light of that knowledge, I decided I should try to do. At least give it one really grand attempt. So here it is, my humble first solo push into a big, scary world.