Margo Solod has been an innkeeper, restaurant owner, chef, lighting designer, carpenter, and factory worker. She will do most anything to support her writing habit.After 20 years of traveling, 4 poetry chapbooks, 1 full-length book of poetry, 100+ published poems in 70+ magazines and 6 anthologies, 1 memoir with recipes, 3 trucks, and 9 sets of tires, she has settled in the middle of 68 acres in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with her partner of more than 14 years and a varying assortment of rescued shelter dogs.I came to writing fairly late. That is, I did not grow up, as many of my friends did, knowing I had to write.I dabbled in school; a few poetry contests as a child, and one brilliant 4th act to Ibsen's Hedda Gabler in college where I turned that classic drama into a mystery. I still don't understand why that version didn't catch on and make me a million dollars. But after that class I put down the pen and picked up first a crescent wrench, then a hammer, and finally a chef's knife. (I prefer a 6" Henkel with a plastic handle. For the knife, that is. I never had a brand preference in hammers or wrenches.)I moved to a remote island, and during one long lonely winter I began to write again, returning to my first love, poetry. This was back in the ancient era of typewriters and actual snail mail anchored by handwritten letters. In this way I received what little "formal" writing training I have; thick brown envelopes of poems sent back and forth between myself and a few amazing teachers I who were willing to try and teach me by mail.Slowly my poetry improved, and I got bold enough to send work out. At first, individual poems to small literary magazines and then, as these began to be accepted with some regularity, chapbooks of themed poetry to contests. While searching for contests I found Flight Of The Mind, a writing workshop for women that ran every summer for two weeks in a monastery in Oregon. I made friends and met mentors there that have remained valuable resources to me to this day.I applied to and was accepted at the Vermont Studio Center. I published my first and second chapbooks and won a few minor awards. And I came to the realization it was time to leave the island and begin on career four, or maybe five. At a certain point you lose track.During several of my previous careers I'd moved around a lot, and I'd decided that when I settled down I would try the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.And that, dear reader, is where the official bio picks up. I traded Vermont for Virginia Center for Creative Arts, an artist's residency that has afforded me much time and space to create. I published two more chapbooks and a full length book of poetry, and then, seemingly, I was done with that genre. I haven't written a poem since 2006. Next I turned my hand (or more aptly, my fingers) to creative non-fiction, and published a memoir of place dealing with my island years. And that appears to have been the beginning and end of my nonfiction career.Now I'm working on a trilogy of 'tween adventure novels, set on an island suspiciously similar to the one I lived on for so long. After I finish those, I think I'd like to try my hand at a YA novel. I have all these ideas . . .If I had the temerity to give anyone advice about writing, it would be this- READ. Read everything, and anything. Then turn off the editor in your head and let your imagination go.