Category Archives: books

Intriguing Challenge for Biblioracles

If you like to read, this challenge will intrigue you: write a list of the last five books you’ve read. Then consider what your list might mean to someone else.

John Warner figures that out in his weekly Chicago Tribune  column titled The Biblioracle. From the lists emailed to him, he assesses what the person likes to read—for instance, a list may show that the reader “likes solid characters” or “doesn’t mind going down a weirder path”—and then recommends what to read next.

Warner’s column came to mind last week as I was thinking about this belated Monday post. I was far from home, “house sitting” my young adult, self-sufficient grandchildren. and had thought  I’d have lots of time to read. I didn’t, however, because it was much more fun hanging out with them as they dashed in and out between their active work and school schedules.

My personal assistant for the week!

My personal assistant for the week!

But I did squeeze in reading three books. So, pretend for a moment that you are a Biblioracle and are figuring out what you think I may want to read next.

Timothy Kurek’s The Cross in the Closet, the story of a young white male, a Southern Baptist, who goes undercover for a year as gay to experience that life first hand.

Mary A. Osborne’s (author of Nonna’s Book of Mysteries) Alchemy’s Daughter (forthcoming, second in a series of three), a story of a young woman in fourteenth century Italy torn between convention and desire.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the story of a man who changes personalities back and forth between good and evil.

Cover of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Andre ...

Cover via Amazon

 Because the Tribune’s Biblioracle has a list of five to work with, I’ll add two books I bought while on a shopping spree with my granddaughters that included a thrift store. I’ve not read them yet, but the titles seem to tell their story.

Geneen Roth’s Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

Lewis Smedes’ Standing on the Promises: Keeping Hope Alive for a Tomorrow We Cannot Control

 At the end of the week with my grandchildren, I spent the weekend with one of my sisters living nearby. We are known to talk for a week straight, so we had to talk fast.

Of course we talked books. She was my high school American Literature teacher in 1958. I told her my idea for this post and gave her my list of titles. She volunteered her recommendation for my next read: John Grogan’s (author of Marley and Me) new memoir, The Longest Trip Home, the story of a spiritual struggle.

Do this exercise for yourself. Do you see a pattern in what you choose to read, or do you like to skip and hop among the variety of selections?

If you’d like to make a recommendation for me, let me know by clicking on comments at the bottom of this post. Happy reading!

Nurse Shares Her Experience of Dying

As she lay dying from pancreatic cancer, Nurse Martha Keochareon wanted to do more than plan her funeral. So she called her alma mater and offered to become a “case study” for nursing students. She reasoned she could help students learn about the dying process while, at the same time, it would be a way for her “to squeeze one more chapter out of life.”

I loved this story. First, as a retired nurse educator, I was struck by Nurse Keochareon’s selfless giving. I could identify with her desire to teach; as nurses we are taught, along with being caregivers, to be teachers (as well as communicators, researchers, leaders and more). I believe we consider it a duty and a privilege to empower our patients or students with the resources they need to function successfully in their lives.

Second, Nurse Keochareon had lived with pancreatic cancer for more than six years. Her story of this unusually long experience would have been of great interest to me because my brother died from that type of cancer in less than a year.  What did she know about her prognosis from the beginning? What type of treatments did she have? What quality of life did she have during that long period of time?

And third, I love how she expressed the personal benefit she would get out of sharing her story with nursing students: “to squeeze one more chapter out of life.” For anyone, writer or reader, who enjoys books, just muse about this phrase for a minute…to squeeze one more chapter out of life.

Let’s rephrase that into a question we can ask ourselves:  If I had one more chapter to squeeze out of my life, what would I want to write in that chapter? Based on the “to do” list I compiled recently on a beach chair in Aruba, I have at least ten things to cram into that chapter. And that’s just for starters.

What about you?

Read Nurse Keochareon’s story, featured in the January 11, 2013 New York Times.   

A shout out today for Becky Povich!

From Pigtails to Chin Hairs: A Memoir and More is the captivating title of blogger and humorist Becky Povich’s new book.

As a fellow writer and blogging friend, I’m thrilled she’s made it this far and am happy to support her in her next goal of getting her book published. If you recall my story with Caring Lessons, you’ll know this is no small endeavor!

So, if you have a dollar and a minute to spare and have a heart for writers, join me with her Kickstarter Project.  Deadline January 6 (also her 60th birthday!)

Check it out now, while you’re thinking about it. Quick and easy to do with an Amazon account. And thanks!

Nurses are Lifelong Learners (Part 2)

The University of Chicago Logo

The University of Chicago Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A few months ago, I wrote about looking forward to going back to school. Back to the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago. I’d completed three of the four years a few years ago and had a feeling in my bones that I wanted to complete that last year.

Well, I’m back, and I’m drowning in the readings. A classmate suggested listening to the book. Luckily, with my almost new smart phone, I could download a free app to listen to Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War.  I’ve found if I can listen while I read, the challenging content and small print become much more manageable.

So, the other day, I was listening to yet another detailed account of the endless battles between the Spartans and Athenians when my husband walked in. He paused a split second and asked, “WHAT are you listening to?”

It’s sort of that bad. For instance, enjoy with me:

About the same time three Spartans–Ramphias, Autocharidas, and Epicydidas-led a reinforcement of nine hundred hoplites to the cities in the Thracian region and arriving at Heraclea in Trachis made changes and reforms there as they thought best.

Multiply that sentence by 57 pages of sentences like that for part of this week’s reading, and you can see why  listening to some romantic narrator with a British accent considerably brightens the reading session, even though just the thought of it baffles one’s husband.

Now I have to catch up with a Plutarch reading yet, but I think that may be more than you want to hear about today. I keep reminding myself that I am a lifelong learner, I’m taking these courses by choice, and I’m having a great deal of fun.

 

Women, write your life!

Cover of "Writing a Woman's Life (Ballant...

Cover via Amazon

I”m working on a speech to nurses about why we should write our nursing stories. I came up with a host of reasons, twenty-three to be exact, but the one that grounds all the other reasons I read in Carolyn Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life, published in 1988.

This book is a classic because in it Heilbrun describes the history of how women have been portrayed in a traditionally male-dominated world. How the first female writers had to write under assumed names to have their writing recognized. How writing by women has evolved. And how women finally found the courage to express their own independence from a male-dominated culture.

Every time I reread this book, I feel a rant coming on. A healthy rant, because it motivates me to keep writing.

It motivates me because I am a woman, of course, but especially because my profession has always been female dominated and because we still live in a male-dominated world. And I want to follow those women who mustered up the courage to not let society dictate who gets read and who doesn’t. And I want to portray who I am myself and not leave that up to others.

What about you? Who will write about your life?

Nurses are Lifelong Learners

It’s August 1 today and my body is automatically going into back-to-school mode. For about half of my seventy years, either as a student myself or as a teacher of nursing students, I’d spend August assessing my wardrobe from next-to-skin to outerwear.

Then I’d shop. My wardrobe had to be in place before school started because once it did, I knew I’d have no time to worry about my clothes. I’d also check my desk supplies—three-ringed notebooks, ball point pens, yellow highlighters—and, in later years, multicolored sticky notes. And I’d check my unhealthy snack supplies. It’s always good to have some M&M peanuts on hand for munching while highlighting a text book or grading papers.

So, with my body churning into academic mode, I, once again, am going back to school. After all, in the four programs in which I was a nursing student, and in the four nursing programs in which I taught, one program objective always addressed the nurse as a lifelong learner. In fact, we used to say, the nursing knowledge we learn today will be obsolete within five years.

Now, I’m in to gaining other knowledge. Sizzling with excitement yesterday, I took the ten-minute walk up to the Gleacher Center, the University of Chicago’s downtown campus, to register for the fourth (and last) year of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults.  I started the program seven years ago, but have sat out the last four years, busy with breaking my hip and promoting Caring Lessons, and now the time is clear to finally finish up.

Gleacher Center

Gleacher Center (Photo credit: beautifulcataya)

On the sidewalk outside the Gleacher Center, I met a friend who teaches there. “Looks like you’re on your way home,” I said. He told me he’d just had a stimulating meeting with international leaders. Then, with a quizzical look on his face, he asked, “What brings you here?”  I explained how I’d had to sit out of the Basic Program, but the fourth year curriculum of starting out with a study of Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War had been pulling at me all this time. He burst out laughing and said something like “Yes, I can see that. That war nags at me too.”

English: The Alliances of the Peloponnesian War

English: The Alliances of the Peloponnesian War (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Now I sit at my computer and look longingly at the required texts on my bookshelves. I’d already purchased them when it became clear that I couldn’t return. But they have patiently waited for me. For the seminar section of the ten week session, there are Plato’s Symposium, Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. And for the simultaneous ten-week tutorial, there is Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War.

Of course, just below these required texts on my bookshelves, sit my all-time nursing favorites: Stuart & Sundeen’s Principles and Practice of Psychiatric Nursing, Shelly and John’s Spiritual Dimensions of Mental Health, Orem’s Nursing: Concepts of Practice, and Marriner & Tomey’s Nursing Theorists and their Work. These books will live on forever in my mind.

But, in my transition from nursing to writing and the study of the humanities, on this searingly hot and humid August day in Chicago, I want to shout, “Let the learning begin!”

“What’s Love Got to Do with It? A Field Guide to the…

Sentence in Poetry and Prose” was the catchy title faculty member Juliet Patterson chose for the week session I just completed at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. The festival, held on the University of Iowa‘s campus in Iowa City, is enjoying its twenty-sixth year.

Starting in 2001, I’ve attended the festival seven times and taken thirteen courses. It should be clear that I love it, everything about it: the four-hour drive from my skyscraper life through corn fields to a small city sloping downhill off I-80; the impressive Pentacrest (former capitol building of Iowa, flanked by four majestic rectangular buildings); the L-shaped, tree-shaded, pedestrian mall featuring boutiques, bars, bookstores, and restaurants; plus the variety of courses, the excellence of faculty, and the diversity of classmates.

The first years I took courses on writing memoir. Then I branched out into classes on writing wild, humor, and essays, followed by more specific subjects as writing the scene, showing not telling, and finding my voice.

So, this year was time for getting down to basics-the sentence. And how better to do that than spending time with a poet/teacher and poetry students. They know words, the importance of use and placement of nouns and verbs, dependent and independent clauses, syntactical devices. And much more.

Juliet started us at the beginning–diagramming sentences to make us aware of what part of the sentence each word plays and progressed through inspiring examples of sentence writing from poets like Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop and prose writers Tim O’Brien and Barbara Kingsolver.

And, at a writing festival, what do you think you’d find in a Beadology shop? If you can get past all the colorful beads, you’ll find festival students from all classes giving a three-minute reading on Open Mic night. I was one who got stuck in the shop and bought a silk pink and black long scarf from Karen Kubby, featured below in a slide show.

At the reading, I presented the ostomy story from my memoir Caring Lessons. Afterwards, one older man said, “Wow…I had no idea. My mom was a nurse and I still had no real idea of what nurses do.”

Exactly. That’s why we nurses have to write.

If I’ve made your fingers long for a pen or keyboard, you must plan to go to Iowa yourself. To give you an inside look at what you could experience there, travel along with me on this pictorial representation that I’ll call, simply, Iowa.  No words, just images. See what feelings bubble up.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Thanks to Juliet (below, striped tank, black shoulder bag) and classmates (one is missing), our group jelled well and were appreciative and supportive of each others’ work.

After class on our final night, a few of us lingered. “Does anyone want to do dinner?” Juliet asked. It clearly was hard to part. We went to Masala for Indian food. We sat around an old fashioned oak table, extended with two leaves to accommodate our group, making it feel much like a family dinner.

As the food was starting to come, Juliet asked the straw-hatted man above if he would say grace. He agreed, and we spontaneously formed a circle with our hands. He intoned his opening words with a palpable heartfelt resonance, “God of all peoples…”

So what’s love got to do with it? I already know. What do you think?

Review of Caring Lessons by Mary A. Osborne, Nurse and Author

I’m happy to present a recent Amazon review of Caring Lessons: A Nursing Professor’s Journey of Faith and Self  by Mary A. Osborne, nurse and author of Nonna’s Book of Fiction,  titled A Purpose Driven Life:

It is an act of bravery to reveal one’s life story in detail, to express one’s struggles and fears publicly. Done skillfully, memoirs tell the truth while transforming an ordinary life into an inspiring narrative. Lois Roelofs Ph.D. worked an R.N. in various capacities–from staff nurse, to nurse researcher, to nursing professor–before she decided to share her journey in Caring Lessons: A Nursing Professor’s Journey of Faith and Self. The book is a thoughtful and authentic chronicle of the author’s life from her nursing student days through her early retirement.

As an RN myself, I could easily relate to Roelofs’ story, written with candor and humor, and her ongoing quest to find the nursing position which best suited her unique talents. She writes with honesty about an episode of depression which she suffered during the early years of her marriage in the 1970′s. Feeling overwhelmed with the demands of caring for her two small children and dissatisfied with having set aside her own ambitions, she reached a breaking point.

In Caring Lessons, Roelofs expresses what other married women might feel but are perhaps not willing to speak aloud. Though forty years have passed since the author took a personal time-out, it is still risky for a woman who has a caring husband, beautiful children, and a nice house to admit she’s feeling hemmed in. Women who are lucky enough to have all the material blessings in life are supposed to be content and grateful. Roelofs’ story reminds women that it is all right to feel discontent and encourages them to continue the journey in search of personal fulfillment despite the inevitable obstacles that are encountered.

Author Lois Roelofs

Author Lois Roelofs (Photo credit: Lansing Public Library, Lansing Illinois)

After reading about her episode of depression, it was not surprising to me when Roelofs later described her decision to specialize in psychiatric nursing. The best healers are often those who have journeyed through their own pain and learned to find true compassion for others. I would describe Lois Roelofs’ nursing career not as a profession, but as a vocation. With tireless dedication driven both by intellectual curiosity and the desire to follow the ideals of her Christian faith, the author has lived a truly purpose-driven life. There are many who admire nurses and the work they do. Caring Lessons is a wonderful reminder of why many of those who enter the profession become earthly angels.

Caring Lessons is an inspiring read for nurses and those who aspire to the field, as well as those who are curious about the behind the scenes lives of nurses and nursing educators.

Thanks, Mary, for your insightful and beautifully written review! It was great meeting you serendipitously at AWP last fall. And, readers, you will enjoy learning about Mary’s Nonna’s Book of Mysteries here.

Coming next Monday: Caregivers Write Your Stories (#4)

Caregivers Write Your Stories (#1)

So, you’ve thought about writing your stories, but you certainly don’t have time. And you have no idea how to start anyway. Excuses.

Last Wednesday at the Palos Heights Public Library (IL), participants in Caregivers Share Your Story learned they could start writing their stories in only ten minutes. Caregivers can include all of us–we all either care for someone or ourselves.

First, they made a list of ten things they thought was important in their caregiving roles. These could be events, feelings, characteristics…whatever came to mind.

Second, they circled the one item that felt most important right then.

Third, they wrote nonstop (called a “free write”) for ten minutes. No thinking, no editing, just keeping the pen moving on the page.

Ten minutes later, each had a rough draft of a story. Something they could go back to some day to revise and refine. But the story was out of their minds and onto the page. Simple.

A photograph of a 2 month old human infant, hi...

A photograph of a 2 month old human infant, his mother, his maternal grandmother, and his maternal great-grandmother.

Do a ten-minute free write every day, and you will have a book length manuscript in no time to revise and refine. Think in the future how your grandchildren will enjoy reading how you gave their grandpa Old Spice every Christmas because that’s what he was wearing the day you met, how you took your temperature daily for years in your effort to get pregnant for their mom, how that new baby nearly drove you over the edge as she  mushed her peas time after time into the crevices of her high chair, and on and on. The little things. The family traditions. The things that make us human. The things that make us family.

I have just a few writings from my folks and maternal grandmother. I wish I had many more. I want to know about their ups and downs. I want to know them better. But once they died, their stories died too.

So, don’t wait. Start now. Write from your heart. Your grandkids will appreciate it…some day.

Next time, I’ll talk about why it’s good (and fun) as a caregiver to write our stories.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Caring Lessons – Blog Tour Over – What Next?

I’m finished, ” I announced to my husband late last week. Always appearing a bit skeptical when I make such announcements, he said, “With me, or what?”

Of course, I had to say not with him, not with our fiftieth wedding anniversary coming up–I mean why would I trade down when we have a good thing going here–but I said, “With the active promoting of my book.” Then I gave him my rationale–it’s been over a year and a half of busyness–fun, but busy–and  I’m ready to go on with the next phase of my life.

So with the book blog tour over (thanks to all of you for your faithful following), and with five hundred (yes, that’s 500!) more postcards out, this time to nursing administrators in hospitals in the Midwest, I think we’ve covered much of the potential market for Caring Lessons.

at caribou, completing "my" assignment

I say “we” because I must again give credit to Amy Nagelkirk, my former student–a ’92 grad from Trinity Christian College–for staying on my case. Lots of promo things and lots of the hard work are thanks to her (and the friends she recruits to help her). With the second batch of five hundred post cards (the first batch went to schools of nursing), Amy “assigned” me only one hundred twenty. She and her friends have completed the rest, plus she did the search to find all the administrators’ names and hospitals in these states.

I also want to thank Dr. Sue Dunn, Dr. Patsy Ruchala, and Dr. Laurel Quinn, deans/directors  of the nursing programs, respectively, at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, University of Nevada-Reno, and Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, IL. They helped promote Caring Lessons recently at the semiannual meeting of  AACN (American Association of Colleges of Nursing) for deans/directors in Washington DC.

So, what’s next? Another writer has stated my thoughts at this time about book promotion so well. I will reblog her essay on Wednesday.