Sonia Levitin

My life as a writer began when I was eight years old.  I wrote a neighborhood newspaper and sold it for 5 cents a copy.   The venture turned out to be a monetary catastrophe and I began to write poems and stories.  A real break through came when,  after graduating from the  University of Pennsylvania,  I  was accepted  into a directed writing program  with Walter Van Tilburg  Clark.    These were golden times for me, working one-on-one with a great writer and teacher.  I have never forgotten those lessons, and when later I became a teacher of creative writing, I passed them along to my own students at UCLA Extension, where I taught for many years.
Most recently I have re-discovered the joy of painting.  I do mostly ink and water color and find it to be exciting and spontaneous, quite different from writing, which requires another kind of concentration.