When I began college, I was in the middle of a five-year case of writer’s block, so I made other career plans. I chose psychology, with an eye to working with kids, structuring most of my work-study jobs to that end as I took courses in education and social work as well as psychology. Just before the start of my junior year, my writing returned to me. After that, I forgot my original goal. I wrote. After I finished the manuscript of a long, single adult novel titled The Song of the Lioness, I drifted until my dad and stepmother invited me to live with them in Idaho. A week following my arrival, I found a job in the only thing I was educated for: I became a housemother in a group home for teenage girls. Many events in “Testing” actually happened to me, though not all in the first week. My girls were lively, inventive, and well defended. By the time I met them, their trust had been abused so often that it was hard for them to open up. I began a dialogue with them not through photographs, as X-ray does, but through storytelling.
