What does your anti-bio say about you?
Jess Janz hosted a writing workshop and encouraged us to think about who we are outside of our professional titles. She asked us to think about ourselves in terms of what our bio doesn’t say. A little background: Ms. Janz has hosted hundreds of dinner parties where she brings strangers together. The one rule of these parties is that people aren't allowed to ask - ‘What do you do for a living?’
Our writing prompt, which Jess put up on the screen, was: “WHAT DOES YOUR BIO NOT SAY?” (Jess Janz’s book just came out - The Table Where We Meet: Lessons Learned From Dinner With 1000 Strangers.)
Here’s what my bio does not say:
Katie Rizzo loves composting food and giving that ‘garbage’ to her hollyhocks. She loves the way those flowers make a high-rise of frill. Besides hollyhocks, her other favorite flowers are purple cosmos and every type of poppy. One year she was able to grow a pink, orange, and lavender field of poppies and cosmos.
Katie looks for signs from her son in licence plates, the natural world, and when anything goes a little amiss. If she could right now, she wants to sit under a pine tree and feel for her son’s presence with her two living sons on either side.
Katie loves coffee and dogs.
People tell her that the way she and her husband look at one another is sweet. Speaking of her husband, she loves when he makes her laugh. That is her favorite.
Katie Rizzo is not good with dates, times, and locations. If you tell her to go to 1234 Street on 12/7 at 8:00, she will never get there at that time, but she will go somewhere else and wait for you. Unfortunately, her husband has to put up with this nonsense and has driven across Phoenix with her to arrive at deserted buildings. Ask him about her problem with plane tickets or airports because he has a few stories.
Rivers, especially rivers traveling in the nooks of mountains, make her extra happy.
A perfect day would start at the top of Aspen Highlands with her family. It would be a powder day skiing, which would then be followed by apres ski at the dog park with her two dogs. Rizzo believes there is almost nothing better than the hush of night over a snowy landscape when a deer bounds across a field. Except maybe a newborn with milk blisters around his lips.
Her favorite feeling is hope. She used to believe that happiness was the goal, but now she knows that being present is better. And she loves it when she finds a dandelion growing out of the cracks of the sidewalk or out of the cracks of grief.
Also, pity is her least favorite feeling aimed at her.
Megan Devine says that grief needs space to unfurl, and maybe there is no truer sentence than that. Sometimes looking out at the ocean in Puerto Penasco is just the right mix of space and togetherness. Everything can unfurl.
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I’d love to read other’s anti-bios. If you write one, send it to me.
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This week I had the opportunity to talk to Maggie Sandnes about a whole host of topics from the World Cup, and how it brought people together, to coming to terms with the reality of grief. You can find our discussion here:
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Katie’s memoir, The Trimesters of Grief, is available for pre-order and will be released on October 6 by Koehler Books, with Blackstone Publishing handling audio licensing. None of Them Are You - A book of Poems is being published by Extra Extra Publishing on Dia de los Muertos, November 1st.
The Trimesters of Grief is available anywhere books are sold:
