Meet Lizzie Wren: Author and fellow traveler

What I most want people to know about me is that I am genuinely ordinary, still becoming the person I write about, and nowhere near as far along in the practice as the book might suggest. I grew up in a small town in Ohio where winters were long and decent people were quietly decent to each other without occasion or audience. That early environment gave me a baseline expectation of genuine care between people that I have spent most of my adult life trying to live up to and frequently falling short of. The writing is not separate from the living. I still perform kindness sometimes when I am too depleted for the genuine version, still find it easier to be generous with strangers than with the people closest to me on the days when closeness feels like pressure, and still have to choose contemplation every single morning, and do not always manage it. I am a reader first, a writer second, and a work in progress always, and the book did not come from certainty or expertise or having figured everything out.