Steven Page

I was born into a Catholic Air Force family in late 1990. Both my parents were officers. My family moved a lot, but as the youngest of four (one brother, two sisters), I was furtunate enough to only have to move once. My family moved from Virginia to Colorado when I was only four and we never looked back. Perhaps it was fate that at that very same time the Quebec Nordiques moved to Denver and became the Colorado Avalanche. They instantly became my family's favorite sports team.

 

The Avalanche wouldn't be the only interest I shared with my family though. As I grew up, I always wanted to do everything my older siblings did. Like my siblings before me, I was a bright child, so when my high school siblings started reading authors like Michael Crichton, it didn't matter that I was only in fifth and sixth grade, I wanted to read the same books. When my brother started playing street hockey with the neighborhood kids, it didn't matter that I was six, I was going to play too. When my oldest sister started acting out stories with action figures, five year old me was going to be right by her side.

 

Reading, writing, and hockey were my life as a child. In second grade I started writing my own stories. In third grade I started playing hockey competitively. I wrote and filled notebooks with tales of aliens, dinosaurs, and space travel. I'd share these tales with my peers. As I entered fourth and fifth grade I started becoming better and better at hockey until I eventually became the offensive star of every team I played for. But in fifth grade, I hit my first road block.

 

That road block was a teacher. She had noticed my story writing, and perhaps it had taken away from other studies a bit. I don't remember exactly what she told me, but the gist of it stuck with me: writing fiction was a waste of time. I didn't quit writing right away. I never liked that teacher, so I continued writing through sixth grade in defiance, filling two notebooks with what I referred to as my first screenplay. But as I entered into middle school my peers stopped taking as much of an interest in my writing. The words of that teacher hung in the back of my mind and I questioned whether I really was wasting my time. I quit writing and soon after I quit reading too. It was around this time that I was recruited to my for a travel hockey team.

 

I have to say, my parents never blatantly told me that they couldn't afford for me to play for that travel team, but I knew I couldn't put my family through the financial hardship that would follow. Times were tough on us. My family and I turned down the offer. I knew I couldn't play for that team. I also knew that that team was the only chance I ever really had at playing in the NHL some day. I continued to play hockey, but never with the same boyish hope as I did when I was young. Both my dreams it seemed, had died.

 

With my childhood dreams seemingly crushed, I poored my time into a new talent that followed in the footsteps of my siblings: music. In middle school, I started playing in the high school band. I learned fast and quickly became a very talented timpanist. I grew a passion for music, I even became very good at writing it, but I never had the same passion for music as I did for writing and hockey. When people asked me what I wanted to do, I'd say I wanted to be a composer while shrugging inside. The future didn't much matter to me at that point. I didn't care about much.

 

The summer after my freshman year in high school I had one of those life changing moments. It was a moment when I discovered that dispite how little I cared about myself and my future, there were people in my life, particularly my family that did care about me. This revelation led me toward the sacrament of confirmation and discovering my Catholic faith in my sophomore year.

 

That same year I had a teacher that helped me rediscover my love of reading and writing. His passion and care inspired me to read my first book in nearly three years. At the end of my semester with him, he held a writing competition among the sophomore classes. Each student had to write a short story incorporating various elements of story telling. The winner of each class would be published. I won my class and had my first publication at age sixteen. 

 

That same teacher had a creative writing course that I took my senior year of high school. That course was one of the three English classes I took my senior year. With his help, I was published for a second and third time that year.

 

Despite rediscovering my passion for writing, my college plans led me toward seminary, as I had spent my senior year of high school as a celibate, while I discerned the priesthood. Ultimately, I was denied entering seminary straight out of high school and ended up at the only other school I had applied: Metropolitan State University of Denver. My freshman year of college was a difficult one for me, but it ultimately led me back toward the boyhood dream that I still had alive. I was going to be a writer.

 

Today, I continue to pursue my goal of becoming a free lance writer. I've been published two more times and have led my way into the blogging world and a way to combine my love of writing and my love of hockey. It seems to me now that my story has really started to take shape. I don't know how this story will end, but I know there's a lot more to write.