I hit a train a week after my 18th birthday, the night before I  was to leave to attend the McConnell School of Travel in Minneapolis.  As much as people say "get over it", I still struggle with making plans and living further than one day at a time.   This  was intensified after another (fairly minor) accident when I was 24, living in Phoenix, then when my dad was suddenly left paralyzed from the neck down after a freak accident on a basketball court, four months before his 65th birthday.

I stopped writing until I reached age 29 and my new husband bought me an empty journal to fill and promised never to read it without my permission.    I wrote in fits and starts.  Wrote, stopped, bought another journal, wrote, stopped,  took a correspondence course in Children's Literature, took classes at community colleges,  wrote, stopped, wrote a little more. Stopped.  Moved back to Wisconsin with my husband and found Lakeland College.  A place to pursue the long lost dream of earning a degree.  And they offered a major, in Writing!  So here I am, writing and avoiding writing and needing to write so bad it hurts, and still torturing myself with multitudes of ideas and unspoken words. 

Favorite authors are the Russians.  Dostoyevski and Tolstoy.  I would love to find a class on Russian Literature.  I'd eat it right up.  Favorite poets are the newly found (to me) Mary Oliver.  Elizabeth Bishop.  Charles Simic.  And the writers of the Book of Psalms. 

Three  things I wish to pursue as a writer:  Writing meditations on scripture, writing a screenplay for "Without a Trace", and an MFA.    And then there's that tap on the shoulder I got in the waking hours of the morning, while living in Silverton, CO..."Write a story for kids, about morals".  I swear it was straight from Jesus, but what do I know?