I’ve always written, but I didn’t know I wanted to be a writer until after my four grown children moved out of the house and we moved to Lake Lanier in Georgia where I found a bin full of past writings. It was then I decided to retire and take classes in creative writing.

I found copies of my High School literary magazine called the GAM-TIL. (It was named way before my time but stood for LIT MAG backwards.) I also found notebooks upon notebooks of lyrics and poetry, I and some of my friends wrote. Most importantly I found my journals, with both prose and poetry, from my “non-writing” years while I raised my family which offered much fodder for my current writing. I did a lot of writing back then for not being a writer.

In junior high school I fell in love with Rod McKuen’s poetry (what a 70’s thing to say!). The Beautiful Strangers and Moment to Moment could always be found in my backpack serving as inspiration for my own poetry and lyric writing. (They can currently be found on the bookshelf in my den.)  From All Teens to All Parents was my first published poem and could be found in our local hospital’s newsletter.

I’ve always been an avid reader. I remember exactly where I read The Exorcist- on the top bunk in the room I shared with my younger sister in our Chelsea Street house. I remember reading Anne of Green Gables in Mrs. Chamber’s second-grade classroom. She was the best. She encouraged us to write songs for daily activities, such as lining up for lunch or doing our homework at home, and she would play the guitar as we sang them.

In high school, I was fortunate to be accepted into the Humanities program. Instead of separate History, English, and Literature classes, there was one class involving them all (and sometimes included math, science, and music.)  We did a lot of reading and writing. I believe it is becasue of this I became a historical fiction buff.

One semester my entire grade was based on any project I chose to create. I memorized the 88 lines of Longfellow’s The Wreck of the Hesperus and presented it along with a summary of the story and a history of Longfellow to the class. Irony: the storyline of the poem encompasses the theme that threads throughout all my women’s fiction writing: How we cause so much pain within our families due to miscommunication and misconception even in the name of love and protection.

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