WRITER | STORYTELLER | GRANDMOTHER
Connecticut-based writer. Heading into yet another round of who I am. My middle-of-life years—mother, wife, professor—all used up, a good chunk of time gone. But lucky me, there’s more. Lots more. Who knew?
Writing:
Later years bring new possibilities, more avenues to explore, among them writing full time. FULL TIME! What a luxury. Worth the wait? (We’ll discuss that another time.) I have four pieces in press or recently published. My Flash Memoir piece, “Life Lesson,” won a Blue Ribbon! Not bad, for a grandmother. Keep scrolling.
Storytelling:
Did you realize human creatures are storytellers by nature? It’s the way we understand the world. It’s the way I tell my stories about me, about my kids and especially about my youngest grandkid who began storytelling at age three. He’s never stopped, even now at age 23. I’m narrating the ups and downs of this Gen Z kid in my memoir, my grandmother chronicles. Excerpts further on.
Grandmother:
Me? A grandmother? Interestingly, it never crossed my mind. Only a blip on my senior agenda. Until it happens! The blip balloons into a massive magnet! I fall in love all over again, my grandkids’ energy and creativity make me feel young, full of hope, along with many fears. How in the world can I best protect my kids and grandkids against the prospect of a terrifying future?
WRITING MEMOIR
My story is about being a grandmother in the twenty-first century—my delights and my challenges. Through my grandmother lens, I trace a through line of my companionship with my grandson Matthew from his second-grade self to the present.
Four published excerpts explore the significance of story in both our lives. We tell the world how to be in our tales as well as construct who we are: each of us on our own as well as our collective selves.
A Grandmother’s Tale
Literary Mama Journal
Just nominated for Pushcart
More Than Human
Halfway Down the Stairs
Anniversary Issue
Surviving
Creative Nonfiction
Power of Play Issue
My flash memoir reveals how stories of life on my family farm shaped who I am. Caring for and about our farm animals gave never-to-be-forgotten teachings.
Life Lesson
Grand Dame Literary Journal
BLUE RIBBON WINNER FLASH MEMOIR
At ten-years-old, I spend afterschool hours and weekends roaming our small family farm and nearby fields in southern Pennsylvania. It is the late-1940s. I climb up the big maple to sit in the tree house my father built. My roost overlooks the barnyard. The chickens don’t seem a friendly group, flapping their wings and squawking loudly if the territory of one is invaded by another. They pick on each other, gang up on a member of the brood for no apparent reason and peck it until it bleeds. To stop the bullying, I shriek threats: “Stop it! Or I’ll come down and chase you!” Which I am not allowed to do with these egg-laying hens. No trespassing in their enclosure. The sound of my screams interrupts the terrorizing, at least momentarily.
The sow usually waddles out of her doorway into her yard to root in the hay and roll in the dust. When she doesn’t, I sing out “Hellooo” over and over. Sometimes I rouse her and sometimes I don’t. Not until I read Charlotte’s Web years later to my son do I meet Fern, a farm girl just a tad younger than me.
Though I never name the sow the way Fern christens her pig ‘Wilbur’, I worry about her sad eyes, always watery and droopy. I envision pig friends visiting to cheer her up. As if in answer to my hope, a male pig is brought to stay with her for several days that February. Three months later she delivers a dozen piglets. I am overjoyed. She seems happy and peaceful, lying comfortably on her side, snoozing, and snorting with her brood for company. I visit the tree house both before and after school, to enjoy the muddle of piglets nursing contentedly on their mother’s swollen nipples.
Unlike Fern with Wilbur, I cannot save the sow from execution. After her plump six-month old piglets are sold, my father hires a professional butcher to slaughter her. The gunshot wakes me early in the morning. I race downstairs to the kitchen. My mother’s look tells me what happened. I fall into her arms and cry. What could be crueler than to slay the sow in an early morning ambush in what has been her family home?
After school that day, I walk by the stream across the road from our house. The path winds through clusters of trees down to a waterfall. I sit on a boulder as near as I can get to the roar of the cascading water. The sound surrounds me, making it easier to contemplate the way things are. We pretend that the health of our creatures is for their own good and then end their lives at peak condition for our own consumption. To share my memory of the sow is one way for her life story to live on.
Before memoir, I wrote for educators. Lucky to secure a position in the Department of Education at Queens College, CUNY, my task was to publish or perish. Language education became my specialty. I collected the many ways four- through eight-year-olds explore language in their stories and published the results in two books for teachers.
Literacy Learning in the Early Years:
Through Children’s Eyes.
New York, NY.
Teachers College Press.
Word Play and Language
Learning for Children.
Urbana, IL.
Nat. Council of Teachers of English.
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CONTACT
I welcome the opportunity to work with grandparent and senior groups/clubs/events, educational organizations, conferences, etc. Please email me directly.
Besides Instagram, please visit me on Facebook and Twitter for views of Grans Alive, Kid’s World, Outdoor Life, and relevant Quotes.