About

Some of the characters in my Zimmerman Studios work have been with me since I was twelve years old.

These stories started in a fictional cooperative my younger sister and I created when we were adolescents. Later, our friend Jenna K. Ingham created characters that lived in the same world. When I was in my mid-twenties, my sister decided to step away from the story. Because so many of my own characters' dynamics were shaped by interactions with her characters, I stepped away, too. That all sounds very logical and measured, but I actually went through a complex grieving process for this lost world.

Almost twenty years later, Narratively put out a call for stories about your "secret obsession." I wrote an essay about the fictional world I had abandoned, preparing to share the story with an outside audience for the first time. It both healed me and shook something loose. I finally felt ready to read the writing I had done about these characters so many years ago.

As a middle-aged woman who had experienced many of the things I had only imagined back then--including living for six years in an artist cooperative--I saw the characters' stories with new eyes. I felt like I could finally do them justice in a way I couldn't when I was younger.

The stories I share here are all new work, written by my older and wiser self, based on the inspiration from my younger, imaginative self.