When I look back at my life, it’s broken into several distinct chapters. Childhood with my parents, running wild and free in the forests of Indiana. Elementary school after moving to Salt Lake City where I competed in scholastic chess tournaments and became one of the top 50 girls under 13 in the US. Junior High and High School. College. And then: integrating into the elite chess world and becoming one of the top 100 women in the US.
The year I spent in the depths of the chess world was probably the most formative of my life. I was exposed to new people and ways of life that I had never encountered before. This was the real start of my adulthood—when I began traveling by myself, when I lived with a boyfriend for the first time, when I moved to California.
So I wanted to tell the story. It was a beautiful story. Exciting and exhilarating. But there were bad times too. Sad. Scary. It was high, and low, and everything in-between. Mostly high, and ending high. I’m happy with how things turned out. But I never want to forget what I went through and the feelings I had, and I wanted to share those with the world so we could all re-live it together.
I began writing my memoir in 2019. I have always kept a journal, and I had hundreds of pages from this period of time that I copied and pasted into a Word document. Then, I added narrative in-between the entries to piece them together. I sent my “manuscript” to close friends to get their feedback. It was middling (and they were being nice).
Read the rest on my new personal website, www.katiekormanik.com.