Leah Gastman Rosasco, a runner up in the Q3 2025 Creative Nonfiction Essay contest with Hiding Spaces, joins us today to talk about her writing journey as well as her winning essay.
Leah considers writing her first love and counts it among her most consistent and reliable companions. Her writing includes poetry, songs, creative nonfiction and visual essays. With hundreds of essay and novel starts over the years, and no endings, Leah credits a recent writing workshop with helping her find her path to developing her work from beginning to end. By shifting her focus from employing writing as an instrument, to viewing writing as her craft – although she has been writing for as long as she can remember – Leah feels she is just getting started.
In addition to writing Leah likes to spend her time baking, hiking, doing yard work, thrifting, and restoring the occasional piece of old furniture. Leah lives in a small(ish) town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada where she and her husband share a 1940s home with their three rescue dogs.
WOW: Congratulations on your winning essay, "Hiding Spaces". Your essay focused on sadness until the end when BOOM, I'm laughing. But it was as if the humor made the sadness even more powerful. Did you consciously combine humor and sadness or did it just happen?
Leah: It wasn’t a conscious decision to write it that way, it just happened. That being said, it was definitely the presence of both sadness and humor in the situation that made me realize I needed to write this essay. There is a lot going on in this piece – longstanding sorrow, feelings of inadequacy and loneliness – but I liked that the humor and the hope kind of floated to the top at the end.
WOW: It seems you've had a long and winding journey, like so many writers while working in a non-writing profession. When was the first time you considered yourself a writer?
Leah: I am still working on getting comfortable with calling myself a writer, although I have known for as long as I can remember that writing is a special, soothing, beautiful place for me to spend time. The first time I understood my writing might be something beyond how I felt about it was when my 5th grade class was learning about poetry and my teacher printed a line from a poem I had written on a banner and hung it over the chalk board in our classroom. The line was nothing terribly spectacular (…where there’s a pencil there’s a poem…) but the teacher loved it for that lesson and saw it as an inspiring visual for her classroom. It was a foreign and wonderful feeling to see my words shared like that and it made me feel like maybe there was more to my writing than I knew.
As an adult the first time I felt like a writer was in 2020 when I hit “SEND” to submit my first essay to the Women on Writing contest. My essay did not advance past the first round but I was elated just to submit it and get feedback on it. Since that moment I have consistently moved closer to considering myself a writer. "Hiding Spaces" was my second submission to this or any contest and having it chosen as a runner up has certainly helped me get a little more comfortable with considering myself a writer.
WOW: I think we should definitely start calling you a writer. Placing in the second writing contest you entered is quite the accomplishment! Although you are a long time writer, in your bio you mentioned feeling like you are starting anew as you change your outlook from writing as instrument to writing as craft. Can you share what you mean by this and how it has changed your writing life?
Leah: For most of my life I have used writing, mostly journaling, as therapy. It was the most effective and consistent tool for helping me work through issues. I would write creative pieces, poems, fiction and nonfiction essays and even songs once in a while, but for the most part I felt like I was writing for emotional survival.
WOW: I can understand that, writing is a coping mechanism for so many people. But what changed?
Leah: About a year ago I started thinking about being more intentional with my writing, which was not something I had considered before then. I had hundreds of pieces started but none of them ever felt finished. This desire to focus on writing as a craft rather than therapy led me to sign up for the Spark Your Story creative nonfiction workshop, which opened doors. I realized there were so many interesting stories, including things I had journaled about for years, that I could approach as an intentional craft. I could look at a topic and figure out which genre I felt told the story the best, make choices about narration, setting, language, cadence, etc. I was ready for this shift and it’s been an amazing experience. Approaching some of these topics in this way has absolutely helped me grow creatively, but I have also noticed that telling stories about these issues or situations or behaviors (like hiding) as an intentional craft has helped me see them as something other than a problem I need to solve. They are just part of my story as a human being and I’m having a lot of fun writing them.
WOW: I'm so glad you're having fun with your new outlook on your writing. Do you have a writing tip you'd like to share with us?
Leah: Let your writing come out as it does, even if it seems like a waste of time. Some of my favorite writing has come from a single line after writing pages and pages of what feels like nonsense, and it often takes me in a direction I could not have imagined before I sat down to write. I think this is what I have learned to love the most about writing, how it flows out and reveals something I did not know existed. Also, when seemingly random ideas or words or sentences pop into your mind, write them down! I have mourned the loss of many great ideas over the years simply because I thought, “That one’s so good I’ll never forget it!” and I do, within five minutes. It’s maddening.
WOW: Oh yes, those ideas or snippets of dialogue that come to you just as you're drifting off to sleep. You wake up and they're gone and all you remember is they were so good! Aside from striving to write every idea down, what’s up next for your writing career?
Leah: I appreciate this question because it is one I have been asking myself. I have written a few essays that I really like that may need some final edits but are pretty much done. I’d like to submit some of these pieces to contests or for publishing consideration. I have also begun the process of looking back at some of my older writing and have found quite a few topics I want to rework into CNF (Creative Nonfiction) essays. I am not sure what is going to come of this and at the moment I honestly don’t have a specific goal or vision other than being open to seeing what develops from this exercise.
WOW: The life of a writer doesn't often have a clear blueprint. It seems there are always more questions about what we should do (and write) next. We wish you all the luck finding homes for your work and look forward to reading more.
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