About me
Writing has always been a compulsion for me. As has reading. While my first efforts might have been fiction (as in the story of The Bear) most of the scraps I’ve found have been nonfiction. In an effort to keep me busy, my mother searched for activities. Cheerleading. Competitive roller skating. Rainbow girls and Job’s Daughters. By Junior High, she alighted on public speaking. She convinced the high school Phi Rho Pi teacher/liaison that I should be allowed to compete with the older students.
Then it became reading, writing and speaking. Impromptu, Extemporaneous, Debate, Informative. These were my competitive areas. For awhile, I dabbled in Dramatic Interpretation but really, how far can Joan of Arc take you?
Apparently, not far enough because I left home (Sarasota, Florida) when I was 17 years old, bounced back for a brief period at 18 then didn’t move back until I was 30 years old. I just needed to get warm.
What happened in the intervening years is part of the ongoing, continuing adventure that is my life. Bad decisions make for good stories, I hope.
I am a writer
The Bear. The backside of that decades-old note has a phone number and other scratches in my mother’s handwriting. While I was delighted to find it in the detritus of her life, I have no memory of it.
Here’s what I think happened: Me, being me, and Mom, being her, she reached into her purse handing me a pen and a scrap piece of paper. “Write me a story,” she would have said. And, I did. This is the first evidence that I am a writer unless you consider the scribbled-in copy of Three Billy Goat’s Gruff. I found that in Mom’s stuff, too.
Mostly, I’ve been paid to write, in the Army, in my jobs, in the company I’ve owned for 22 years: The Environmental PR Group. That work scratched my itch to write.
But, apparently, not enough, because as I searched through my files getting organized for my next career, writing what I want to about things that matter to me, I found bits and pieces of this and that. Some made it to publication, some did not.
