Category Archives: Keri Losavio

Why I’m an Editor, Not a Teacher

25 Saturday Sep 2021

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When I went to college, my double major, English and French, qualified me for one job, according to my guidance counselors: teaching.

But I didn’t want to teach. The education classes I took were populated with students I wouldn’t have wanted teaching my (hypothetical) kids! To be a good teacher, you have to have patience and meet kids where they are.

Still, I needed to work, and a family friend who was a school principal offered me a substitute teaching job. That’s what proved I wasn’t cut out to be a teacher.

Somewhere, a former snotty blonde may remember me as the B**** who told her that just because she was 18 didn’t make her an adult. Making good choices and taking responsibility for her life would be a good start.

She had told me that being 18 made her an adult and gave her the right to make her own choices about what to do. I remember telling her she had one thing right: It was her choice if she wanted to graduate. And reading Glamour and painting her fingernails in English class wasn’t the way to go about reaching that goal.

After that, I found my first job as a proofreader.

Thank you, Larry, for giving me a chance. You taught me to take a chance and do what I wanted to do, not what I was expected to do.

Rainy Sunday Ramblings

08 Sunday Feb 2015

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First rain in the Bay Area in 2015 this weekend. We’ve been listening to wind howling and rattling the vertical blinds in the bedroom. Cappy keeps sitting by the glass doors to the backyard asking to go out. When the sun briefly came out and splintered into a flat rainbow – yes, flat, no arc, just lines of color across the sky and clouds – we let him taste the outside world for a minute. Nothing like watching a small black cat gingerly put a paw down, lift and shake it, quietly picking his way 10 feet out and racing back inside. He meowed at us, asking why we made him go outside.

I like rainy Sundays. We’ve got a fire roaring in the fireplace. John is keeping the music alive. We’re listening to George Harrison sing While My Guitar Gently Weeps right now. I just finished re-reading a short story, The Ramshead Algorithm, by KJ Kabza. It gets the imagination going. It’s firmly rooted in this world but opens up an infinite number of other worlds.

I’m also doing the mundane. I’m trying to regain what I’ve lost, so I’ve been rolling golf balls around in my left hand this afternoon. It seems ridiculous that I can’t grasp a receipt, clip my nails or manipulate money. I know I’m lucky. The strokes could have robbed me of so much more. Yes, strokes, multiple small cryptogenic embolic strokes. I’m still struggling with the fact of the strokes. I’m too young. I didn’t know I was having them when I was having them. The cryptogenic aspect means I don’t know why or how to prevent recurrence. There’s always a bit of fear in the back of my mind now. I don’t like living this way. I don’t know how not to. I have to find my own way through. Please don’t tell me you know what I need to do. You don’t know. It’s my body, my brain, my chemistry. I did not bring this on myself. Eating or not eating something won’t make me better. Shit happens.

And if you believe in God – any God – don’t waste your prayers on me. I don’t believe. That’s not a challenge. Just a statement of fact.

It’s still raining. I hope it rains for a while to come. In every life some rain must fall. The drought needs to be quenched.

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rain shadow

13 Saturday Jul 2013

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I learned today
about a rain shadow
rain shadow
rain shadow.
When it’s raining all around
but not on you …
rain shadow
rain shadow.

Keri Losavio: Writer, Reader, Editor

10 Monday Jun 2013

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I am a writer. I was dictating poems to my mother to write down for me before I could read or write myself. Other kids wanted to be doctors, nurses, firefighters or paramedics, or go into business. I wanted to write.

My dad taught me how to read. Dad taught me phonics in our New York basement, writing, “A Apple, B Banana, C Cat …” on the blackboard and letting me pick up any book that struck my fancy. I remember standing between my parents in the car’s front seat (bench style, pre-car seat and seatbelt laws) trying to sound out the names of store signs. And I became a reader, a bookworm who could hold a complete conversation while reading and never remember a word of it. That ability has mostly served me well over the years, even if my mom doesn’t agree!

When I graduated from college with degrees in English and French and told my guidance counselors I didn’t want to teach, that I wanted to write, they told me teaching pays better. I found a job as a research assistant for a writer of non-fiction self-help books. I took Mike Hernacki’s The Ultimate Secret to Getting Absolutely Everything You Want seriously. A few years later, I convinced an editor at Harcourt Professional Publishing that I was the right person to fill the production editor position they had open.

The rest is history, my history. I’ve been writing, reading and editing (in that order) ever since.

One of my most fulfilling efforts has been with StoryArts, a nonprofit that helps people write their personal stories, their memoirs for limited-run publication. Everyone truly has a story to tell, and it is a privilege to help people tell their stories.

That’s what I do: I help people tell stories. Do you have a product or service to sell? No, you don’t. You have a solution to someone’s problem, a way to improve their story. What’s your story? Let me help you tell it.