Look and Listen

Biography

I am a writer who has loved to read and write since I was very small. I began by making up stories for my little sister, Maureen. To help each story along, I used the shadow puppets we made on the bedroom wall when the streetlamps were turned on at night. During my high school years, I used to take a lot of walks along country roads in England with two of my school chums, Liz and Wendy, telling stories all the time! We had no creative writing classes as such, though I had to write some probably boring essays. Even so, my first article was published in England when I was 16. Besides my sister, Maureen, I have two brothers, Bernard and Richard. Bernard passed away at the age of 5 months, and we're very much looking forward to being with him in the next life. My maternal grandmother, Kate, always said he was too beautiful for this world. As children, we had cats (Tibby, Peter, Sandy, Rusty, and Winkie), the occasional dog (Spot and Prince William), and goldfish (always Goldie, I think). I collected and dried wildflowers, raised caterpillars and tadpoles for school projects, and belonged to Young Farmers Club, sort of like 4-H in the U.S. I moved to the U.S. a week before my 18th birthday to work as a "nanny" in Pennsylvania. Nanny? I spent most of my time cleaning house, since three of the four children were in school most of the time. Needless to say, I moved on, to stay with a penpal in southern Michigan. However, there was little or no work there. Finally, the British Consul in Detroit found me a real "nanny" position with a family, who soon moved to the Chicago area, taking me with them. Eventually, I moved to California and began the next phase of my life, absorbing many experiences that would later dissolve and resurface in much of my writing. This included several lengthy forays into the business world.

Inspiration

My early aspirations were to be a veterinarian, then a linguist/interpreter, then a journalist. Our so-called guidance counselor (at the high school) shot me down on all counts! His attitude was infuriating, discouraging, and blatantly discriminatory. In other words, he was a product of his time. Women didn't do things like that, especially not girls from poor families. To this day, the caste system is still alive and well in Great Britain. If there's any bitterness in me at all, that's where it comes from. But it has driven me to achieve and succeed, and to fight injustice wherever I run into it. Regarding inspiration, no one can truly understand the creative process. It's a gift from God, as all talents are. What we do with those talents is our gift back to Him. But we have to work with the talents we've been given: practice, practice, practice. And most people don't like to hear that. They don't want to know that a pianist, for example, has given most of her life to being the concert level pianist that she has become. I know that during the years I didn't write, or couldn't find the time to write anything creative, my writing talent atrophied. It was hard to get that creativity back. I had to let go of a lot of other burdens that had been dropped on me, to get back to doing the only thing I really want to do. This attitude applies to talents we're not sure we even have, but need to develop, like public speaking, or displaying true courage in everyday situations. Somehow we have to find the time, or make the effort. In today's frenetic world, that can be very, very difficult. We can't just pretend our families and their needs don't exist, but neither can we allow ourselves to come to the end of the road with nothing but regrets to show for our dreams. We need to be able to say, "I did my best with my stewardship. I didn't waste the talent I was given." Readers have told me there's a sense of wonder in my stories and they want to know where that came from. It's part of me, part of the awesome regard I have for the Universe and all the Creator's works. And there are other dimensions to our existence we're not fully attuned to yet, though they are very real. Another source of inspiration for me has been the fact that we change. We change! We're changing every minute of every day. I am not the same person I was an hour ago, and neither are you! Everyone we meet, everything we do, becomes part of who we are now and who we will be in the future. And there are thousands of other lives happening in other universes all around us, on every scale imaginable.