celebrating

As I am in the autumn of my life, my mother is in the winter of hers. Today Mama and I celebrated her birthday with a long phone conversation. Every September I send her a cat calendar. She says that without one she couldn’t get through another year. For this birthday, I also sent her a copy of my first hardback novel, WOMEN OF MAGDALENE.

Mama raised me to love books, tirelessly reading to me and helping me write down my first stories and poems, knowing that I dreamed of being a novelist. She showed quite a flare for writing, herself, coming up with jiggles and creating skits for the women’s guild at church. Once, she told me, she had begun writing a novel—long before I was born, when she was a very young mother taking care of her firstborn alone, her husband away at war. Then, one night she despaired of ever finishing the book, so she threw it on the fire. Her confession of burning those manuscript pages has, in a way, affected my writing as much as has her encouragement.

In the midst of my own whirl of child rearing and wage earning, I’ve written in fits and starts, through interruptions and frustrations, with self-doubt and with relentless determination. Though I can never read what my mother might have written from her experience, I must write from my experience of being her daughter.

Mama offered high praise today for my novel and for Kunati Inc.’s beautifully designed book cover and page layout. She said: “My first thought was ‘how nice that they left space between the lines to make it easier for old eyes to read,’ but now I realize that you planned that so people could read between the lines—and that is what I do. You convey so much with a phrase or a few well-spoken words that the reader can fill in the emotions and importance of what you have written with elegance and beauty.” Well, I’ve had the best of teachers.

Rosemary Poole-Carter, ISBN 13: 978-1-60164-014-7