About

Marcy H. Nicholas

I know it's weird that I am using courier as my font on this web site, but I have fond memories of this font from typing English papers in college on the first (and only) electronic typewriter I owned, a blue Smith Corona. At that time, the typewriter font, I think, was set up as courier. I don't remember when or how I got that typewriter, if my mother purchased it for me or if I saved up for it. But at some point, I owned this typewriter that came with a matching, hard plastic carrying case or a cover that snapped over the typewriter. The typewriter was heavy, and when I plugged it in, the electric motor was loud and whirry. Add that sound to that of actual typing and operating the return on a hard surface and you had a machine that sounded as if it always needed a small engine mechanic. 

After I graduated from college, I'm not sure what I did with that typewriter. I don't know if I took it to graduate school with me or left it at home. I do know that, eventually, the typewriter did wear out: certain keys stuck together when I struck the keys, and the belts of the motor had to be replaced. I'm sure I kept the typewriter as long as I could, but at some point, it wasn't usable. After graduate school, I taught writing at Penn State York, and I was using the school's equipment to type my composition handouts, equipment such as a more advanced typewriter/word processor. In the eighties, faculty were still typing student handouts on carbons and running the original through a mimeograph machine. In 1989, I bought my first computer, a MacPlus, and loaded it up with MS Word. When typing documents, I stuck with courier for a while, but once users had access to a variety of fonts, I leaned into Times New Roman, and in MS Word, Times New Roman is my normal style.

If you read my essays, you know that I haven't had much of a writing career, even though I have always wanted to be a writer and even though I have two degrees in English. My excuse: teaching writing and grading papers took up a lot of cognitive space that I needed for writing. (You can read about this excuse in my most recent publication.) So on this about page, you won't find a list of my books or the awards I've won. 

What I can tell you is that for most of my professional life, I have taught writing, mostly first-year composition at the York Campus of Penn State University. York, Pennsylvania also happens to be my hometown and where I have resided since 1985. After graduate school, I only had about $34.00 in my checking account, so I returned home to live with my mother and had planned on using York as a base to apply for teaching positions. Who would have thought that I would find a teaching position in York and meet my husband at Penn State York, who would become an associate professor of Visual Arts and who also happened to be from York? He and I graduated from rival high schools three years apart.

After all these years of teaching writing, I have finally started to get to my writing, and as you can see, I have had a few pieces published. Most of these pieces are that of Creative Nonfiction (CNF). Briefly, CNF is a literary genre in which writers write personal based essays (and memoir) using the elements of fiction and poetry. By reading these pieces, you will find out a lot about my relationship with the literary arts: reading, writing, and teaching. 

As my teaching career wound down, and as I moved into retirement, I planned to continue to write and publish. Since January 2024, I have been writing almost every morning, from about 9:00 am to 12:00 pm. For the first few months of 2024, I worked on what I thought would be a memoir about my last year of teaching and moving into retirement. I had, I thought, from January to December 2023, taken copious notes about each day. However, as I worked with those notes, I realized on some days, I hadn't taken the right kind of notes, and on some days, I hadn't taken any notes because I was just too tired. My plan to write a memoir was a bust. That's when I started to work on the shitty first draft of a novel I had begun in the fall of 2016. Right now, I have 247 single-spaced pages of material. As I write the novel, I am also writing daily progress reports as a way to reflect on the writing process. 

Although I may add some text on the "Process" page from time-to-time, I won't be fussing with this website too much, except when I announce a new publication. You don't need to follow the site, but I have set up a contact page, if you would like to reach out to me and comment on my writing, discuss what you're reading, or share what's going on in your life as an artist and maker.