Sinking into a lumpy brown corduroy chair next to a teetering bookcase stacked with musty boxes of Scrabble and Monopoly, I flip open my notebook. The watery blue lines on the page offer options to write on top or between. Sometimes I disregard the rules altogether, loop high and low with handwriting I don’t recognize as mine.

My memoir group meets Tuesday mornings in this backroom of the Trail’s End Cafe. The air is thick with railroad history and dust; blurry black and white photos hang crooked on the peeling plaster walls. Sounds and smells of the modern espresso machine in the front of the building reach around the corner.

In this former passenger waiting room, I pull up a creaky wooden chair to use as a foot rest, and invite my childhood to join me. The writing prompts are random and vague. The time limit is 20 minutes to scribble whatever comes to mind. The rule is no judgement or editing: just write.

I never realized I had stories to tell of being four years old in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, of being six or ten years old and then sixteen. Yet seemingly innocent, unrelated prompts bobbed countless memories to the surface. My foster sister who left our house without warning two days after she turned 18. My spinster aunt who drowned herself in the river that flowed behind her dog kennels. My father’s illness and death when I was only 13. Dramatic fights with my mother against each other, then as two distinct forces joined against her cancer.

I remember simple moments in my bones, like soaking my feet in the kitchen sink after barefoot days spent in the coal dust outside and inside our first floor flat. The quirky neighbor who fed squirrels by hand, and gossip from the tavern across the street. All life details I had forgotten, or at the very least judged unworthy of recounting.

Instead I work hard to mid-wife other people’s stories while failing to recognize my own. In the mid-1990’s my mother’s integrative oncologist asked me to “find his voice” and tell his heroic tale of bringing eastern ways to western cancer care. Meanwhile, I am in the midst of my own epic journey with my dying mother, prompted by shamanic dreams in a time spirited with synchronicities. I assume my experiences are too personal to be of interest or benefit to others.

In the next decade I throw myself into writing brilliant descriptions and editing beautiful books for an internationally renown artist. During that period my own clay sculpture is growing to person-size, a remarkable blossoming unique in the ceramic world. But I remain focused outside of myself, on someone else’s success. Unable to breakthrough my personal writing blocks, I can not string together a single sentence about my own work or creative process.

Continually clueless to the parallels, a few years later I sign a contract to write the life story of a man inspired by his relationship with a world-famous architect. I spend countless hours on the phone and in person, eight days a week, trying to get him to share his experiences so I can convey them. I dreamed they would inspire others on their creative journey.

“The juice is in the personal details. Be brave,” I would coax. “Paint the everyday with a vulnerable brush — your authenticity will open hearts and touch others deeply.”

My persuasion and projections fall short. It is his story to tell, not mine. The project goes no where.

Now, in this worn chair soaked in the nostalgia of the countless journeys begun and ended in this train station, I revisit my own journeys. Uncomfortable yet somehow easy, this experience is brand new. I turn around to look at my past, stay still in the present, and squint to look inside. At long last, I am open to healing through a taste of my own medicine.

On the bus with my high school class. No idea what year. Funny how absolutely undefinable and irrelevant the time stamp is: ninth grade, maybe? Journey and Peter Frampton are the soundtrack, maybe. I only care to find my age because the impression is so deep, so lasting.

We were on a field trip to the Milwaukee Art Museum. Now a world-class monument to Calatrava architecture with wings that make it fly along the shores of Lake Michigan. Then, in the 1970s, a cold, dark, dank cement tomb with poorly lit paintings hanging on the walls and cracking black marble floors that hurt your feet through your shoes.

But the Georgia O’Keeffe room, that was a sight to behold. It touched me, tickled me, to the bone. Her curves flowing across the surface, sometimes colored, often white, all thick and luscious. Whether they were flowers or feminine flesh, clouds or bones in the moonlight, I don’t remember.

And there was a Lucio Fontana painting, over there, in the corner, on a wall all by itself. The tan canvas slashed, twice maybe three times, revealing blood red behind the cuts. It didn’t make me want to paint or slash. It made me want to stay and be swallowed in awe.

The sky outside was gray, gloomy, moist. Depressing, actually. But I was lit from inside. Warmed by wonder. My first encounter with modern art, at an ageless point in my life, that stayed frozen just as it was, in my bones and heart forever.

On the bus on the way back to Sheboygan South High, I remember pressing my forehead awkwardly against the bus window to feel the coolness against my flushed skin. I saw myself as a scene in a movie, everyone else on the bus blurred. My blue eyes blinking slowly, staring at nothing but the slate sky moving by.

I was changed. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know why. But I knew.

One impactful left turn in my life began with a small newspaper classified, an illustration of a hand holding a pencil. Only the words “The Drawing Workshop” above a phone number. Why I called, I cannot fathom to this day why I called. George Sotos was the art teacher who appeared before the student was ready.

George had been teaching adult night classes at his studio for over twenty years. Turns out he ran the same ad in the Chicago Reader every week. Although I combed through the newspaper job listings daily, I never noticed his classified until the Spring of 1987. At the time The Drawing Workshop had caught my eye, I had no specific interest in drawing or art in general. I was looking for a light-hearted distraction from my serious soul searching to find my purpose in life. The class was cheap and close to my apartment just north of The Loop.

When he answered my call, George’s voice was gravelly yet pleasant. I explained I was a true beginner: zero training or experience with drawing. He asked me to stop by any afternoon before the class began to gauge my skill level. The thought of “positioning” was intimidating, but I reminded myself this foray was just for fun. Plus George held classes on two floors in the historic Tree Studios building. I could not wait to see the beautiful courtyard referenced on Chicago’s landmark bus tours.

George opened the tall frosted-glass door to his studio with a gracious smile. Standing well over six feet, likely in his early 50’s, he wore baggy blue jeans and a ragged red flannel shirt over his pot belly. George’s graying curly hair was wrestled into a messy ponytail. Round wire rim glasses magnified his olive green eyes and uneven ears.

George skipped the small talk, pointed to a stool, and asked me to sit down. Late afternoon sun was pouring through the 12-foot windows that ran along the entire west wall of his second-floor studio. The glare made me squint. As George handed me a large drawing pad, I thought I saw several figures silhouetted behind him. I blinked hard to help my eyes adjust. Three human skeletons came into focus, each hanging from their own narrow metal stand. Four large wooden tables in the room were covered with more bones, hundreds of bones. Somehow none of it felt scary or morbid.

Before I could make sense of what I was seeing, George pulled over a nearby easel. Next he walked across the room and picked up a simple white plaster form of a female torso — no arms, no legs, no head — just a smooth, fleshy body. It recognized as the classic prop from movies about artists. George carefully positioned the torso on a white pedestal at eye level in front of me. Then he flipped on a bright spotlight that created harsh black shadows beneath the plaster breasts and inside the plaster belly button.

“See what you can do with that,” was all George said. No instructions.

I picked up a stubby piece of charcoal from a little tray. It only took a couple of minutes and a few drawn lines for George to say, “That’s enough. I can see how you see. Very interesting.”

George’s deep voice lifted an octave as he described his perception of my unusual aptitude to see three-dimensionally. Next came the explanation of why so many skeletons and bones lived in his studio.

“Most painters focus on the flesh and don’t see the underlying structure of the human body,” he explained. “I have found a way to train the mind and hand to work together to see three-dimensionally. My students paint from the inside out. The results are amazing.”

Then he said, “I have my students sculpt the bones of the skeleton in clay. Are you interested in doing that?”

Before I could answer, George launched into a passionate, philosophical art lecture. As he talked he pushed around the hanging skeletons which had wheels under a plywood base. I realized there were eight full figures, not three, as he lined them up along the windows. Then George reached across the largest wooden table pushed against a wall. It was covered with hundreds of individual bones in all shapes and sizes. He hunted carefully through the chaos, then grabbed a particular bone.

“We only work with real bones, never plastic replicas,” he assured me. “It’s not easy to get skeletons from medical schools any more. They are getting pricey. But, there is nothing like the real thing.”

With a hint of drama, George pushed aside a pile of bones on smaller table in the middle of the room. He set his chosen bone in the middle of the cleared space. Once separated from the cacophony of other bones, I could see it was an extremely complicated, delicate, fragile butterfly shape.

“That is the sphenoid, the most complex bone in the human body,” said George. He touched the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “It sits here, then goes behind the eyes and connects to virtually every bone in the skull.”

George pulled over another stool. He hauled out a heavy plastic bag from underneath the table, snapped off the rubber band, and pulled out a chunk of red clay. He tossed it back and forth between his palms twice. The blob obediently transformed into a large softball. He tossed it to me.

“Try it,” was all he said.

I did. And I got hooked. Really hooked on the clay and the bones. I didn’t care about drawing or painting the figure. I never tried. Instead I stuck with sculpting each of the 206 human skeleton bones in clay, over and over, for nearly two years. I loved looking at the bones, holding them, tracing their unpredictable shapes with my eyes and hands, replicating their crazy contours. Their subtle asymmetry fascinated me.

I also assembled a full skeleton of clay bones on a metal armature. Somehow it looked eerily like me. In fact many of George’s students unconsciously created self-portrait skeletons. Somehow we brought our own invisible insides to the outside. Creepy and cool to see clay doppelgängers take shape one bone at a time.

I remember having particular difficulty sculpting the ribcage of my skeleton. Coincidentally, later in life I suffered a muscle injury in my back that routinely pops one of my ribs out of place and limits the movement of my diaphragm. I now live with random episodes of being unable to get a full or deep breath, sometimes for days or weeks at a time. Maybe our clay self-portraits were as prescient as they were reflective.