Look and Listen

Biography

I live on a 45-foot bluewater cruising sailboat. It has its exciting moments, but for a writer it creates some substantial challenges. Writers accumulate paper and books, which fill up space quickly. On a sailboat space is at a premium, and minor things like food, water and fuel seem to take priority. Thank goodness for laptop computers and thumb drives. I retired in 2007 with a work history that included substitute teaching, bad debt collection and software consulting. Soon my husband and I will let go the lines to our marina slip in Baltimore and set sail for wherever. The world is so big, and our ship is so small, that we have no idea where the wind will take us, but that is okay. Thanks to GPS, electronic charting and radio, we expect to know where we are most of the time. We hear from cruising friends regularly, attesting to the ubiquity of wifi for communications, so our family and friends should also be able to find us. This adventure should give me plenty of interesting things to write about. Although I had been writing for years, I didn't start working at it seriously until after retirement. I had completed one novel earlier, but since retirement I have completed a book of Christian devotionals and begun another novel. I write for my own web site, as well as for others. I blog. I write meditations for my church newsletter. I tell biblical stories for which I write scripts. I have been published in magazines, but so far my book is still seeking the right publisher. I have published devotions in "The Word in Season," a Lutheran devotional magazine. My article "Turkey in the Cockpit" was published in "Living Aboard" magazine in 2004. In June, my article "Foggett" will be published in "Cruising World," the leading magazine in the world for cruising sailors. I was born in Missouri, where I lived most of my life until 1995. I have two children from my first marriage. After my second marriage in 1995, I moved to Omaha, Nebraska, the biggest small town in America. I loved living there, but they have no ocean access. Larry, my husband, and I learned about sailing on our honeymoon in 1995, and by 2001, we had purchased our sailboat and moved to Baltimore. Although I was reared Southern Baptist, my second husband was Lutheran. I had fallen out of fellowship with Southern Baptists in the late 80's. I didn't know at the time, but I must have been Lutheran inside, because when I started attending Lutheran churches I felt as if I had come home. I love the liturgical calendar. I love the liturgy. I feel in complete fellowship with the theology. Lutheran pastors preached a message that led me to learn forgiveness and love for others which had never penetrated in the past. Learning rich new truths in the Christian faith led me to write as a learning exercise, and that led to writing as an act of sharing with others. Even though I had written stories and poems at various times in my life, sharing my faith became the real reason for writing. I am still finding myself as a writer. I don't know if everyone is like me, but I thought that becoming a writer meant selling lots of books. Now that I have been writing for a while, I see that writing is many things. I am beginning to narrow my focus to some things I do well, because I now see that I can't do everything. Having been a consultant, I know a little about defining the scope of a project, and even a career. I have a love/hate relationship with writing; I love when I am finished with a great piece, but I hate the drudgery of worrying about my commas. I don't know what comes next, but I am excited about it already. So far, life is very good.

Inspiration

I have always enjoyed writing. When I was in the sixth grade, I got very bored with the sentences we were supposed to write with our spelling words. I had three other friends who were as tired of that idea as I was. We four asked our teacher if we could write stories instead of sentences, and she let us try it out. Sometimes each of us wrote our own story, but sometimes we dreamed up a story that we divided into four parts, each of us writing one part using all the week's spelling words. Off and on ever since, I have written all sorts of things. When my children were small, I made up stories for them. Their favorites were "The Car That Ran Away," written after my car was wrecked when I left it in gear on a hillside, and "The Day Grandmother Went Along," about trying to exercise any discipline on children when Grandmother was around. I began writing seriously in 2001 during Lent. That year, I asked myself how Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, could ever have given up that little child at age three. I began studying her story, then backed up to try to figure out what influences would have formed her faith. In order to internalize what I learned, I wrote my study as if it were her journal, describing her experiences and thoughts and questions. That work formed the basis of my entry in the Christian Writers Guild First Novel Contest in 2004. My book, "Hannah's Journal" placed third in that contest, and that experience made me think I was a writer. Along the way since then I have written meditations for my pastor's e-mail newsletter, taught journaling, written prayers and litanies for various events, and I have even had a few articles published. Not everything I write is specifically Christian. I love cooking and sailing, too, and I have a lot of fun with imaginative children's stories. Recently, after I read an article that said that crows are so smart they actually get bored, I wrote a story about a little girl losing a game of tic-tac-toe to a crow. I know that I need to focus in order to achieve real success, but I still enjoy flinging out something "just for fun" like the crow story or like poems for the annual sock-burning celebration at the marina. I hope I mature as a writer. I hope people learn and grow when they read what I write. However, I hope I never lose my sense of humor about it all. I consider myself to be called of God to share, but I serve the God who created orangutans, so I know that he enjoys a good laugh, too.