Pleased to Meet You!
We’ve both found Illumination, so let’s get acquainted. Here’s me
I don’t actually resemble a sea lion. At least I don’t think so
But I once worked at a zoo, where I decided that if I had to choose which animal I would trade places with, the sea lions seemed to be having the most fun. Even though I’m not a fan of raw fish.
I’ve had a great number of jobs and several careers. My resume is full of non-sequiturs: actor; English teacher; non-profit executive; owner of a small lumber company; waitress; small-town mayor; circus performer (not necessarily in that order). In between, I got married, raised children, was widowed, and remarried.
But I was always reading, and whenever I could, writing
In one form or another: journals; long correspondences in the days before email sucked the magic out of letter-writing; poems and stories that never saw the light of day. I once let this slip to a very earnest friend of mine. She asked me, very earnestly, “Would you like to be a writer?”
My answer: “Let’s put it this way: I would like to have written.”
I admired writers and writing so very much, you see, that the thought of placing myself among them made me shy. So for many years any writing I did remained under the proverbial bushel. Eventually, I got to an age where I could accept there were many people far smarter and more talented than I am.
But so what? No point growing older if you can’t also grow bolder.
Now that I’m writing “for real” there’s no going back
Short stories, poems, essays, novels — and all the ancillary writing those things entail, like synopses and query letters and pitches. If you’re a writer, you know what I mean. Embarking on a writing journey is like discovering a fascinating leaf and then finding that it’s attached to a vast and spreading tree. Which is bound through its roots to an entire forest.
But enough with the metaphors. I would like to think that reading my writing is more interesting than reading my writing about my writing, so let’s move on. Here’s a sampler of my work on Medium.
Some of it is pretty personal, like these two in P.S. I Love You:
Some of it is about writing, as in this piece in The Startup:
Or this one, in The Writing Cooperative:
Some is about politics, or climate change, and of course, #Coronavirus. Here’s one that deals with all three:
And sometimes I write just for grins:
Now that we’ve found our way to Illumination, let’s trade inspiration, shall we?
