Hello. My name is Trudy and I am a recovering alcoholic, a former physician, an ex-felon, and a soon to be teacher. I did two stints in the Army, once as a non-com laboratory technician and once as an officer in the Medical Corps as a Pediatrician. I was a practising Pediatrician for almost ten years until a series of events occured after which I did general practise with an interest in pain management. That was the catalist which propelled me into a 5 1/2 year involuntary sabbatical in a state prison. During that period of incarceration, talents which had laid dormant my entire life emerged. I began to draw and to write. I began to make friends, a social skill that I never really had developed in all of my fifty plus years. I began to know who I was, not what I was. Now, almost two years out of prison, I am putting the poems, the drawings and the paintings, which I began during that time, into book form in the hopes that I may show others that those who are inmates in prison are just as human as those of you who are not or have not been incarcerated. And the possibilty of involuntary seclusion is far more likely for anyone than you can possibly imagine. As one reads my work, my hope is that they will identify with the underlying struggle to try to make sense of senseless behaviors and situations, to give hope if they have none, and to share my belief that nothing happens by mere co-incidence or accident. Life, lived to its fullest, must encounter risk and pain, otherwise, it has not been lived at all.

Just paper. It's all just paper.

Presently putting together the book of poetry, illustrated with my drawings. It is called "Involuntary Sabbatical". I also have notes and outlines for future works, one which is to be about patience and waiting on God and another about the actual experience of being a non-criminally minded person in prison. All of the works will and do have heavy spiritual overtones, as that is what my life , at its deepest and truest,is about.

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