My second book, our experience of my husband's terminal small cell lung cancer, is on its final trajectory toward completion. I started it with his first warning sign that something was awry. And hope to have it published by the holidays. In Part One, Refusing Treatment, I describe how the book is structured: "...my story …
Continue reading Memoir-in-Pieces: Announcing Countdown for Cancer Book
Ten years ago this month, the completed copies of Caring Lessons: A Nursing Professor's Journey of Faith and Self arrived in Chicago. I began the writing in 2000, after retiring as professor emerita of nursing from Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, IL. After many revisions, I finished it, finally, around 2008. Then the publishing process took …
Continue reading Caring Lessons Celebrates Tenth Anniversary
Big news! I finished a first draft of the book I'm writing about our cancer experience. In March, when I was in Arizona, I started compiling blog posts written during that time which will serve as the frame of the story. Then I added emails that I'd written to family and friends. Way last November …
In preparation for writing my next book, I completed a tedious and heart-tugging task today. My book will be about the "adventure" Marv and I undertook last year with his seven-month process of living with a terminal cancer diagnosis and my life afterward. The starting point for the book with be the blog posts I …
I've never been clever using as if's or as though's in my writing. I don't, for example, easily make comparisons between wet socks and flopped cakes or fallen trees and failed exams or heads full of curls and gardens over-planted with chrysanthemums. So, once again, I was pleasantly overwhelmed by a book I just finished …
“I’ll never be as good as some of the authors I’m reading” is a common lament I hear when I attend writing workshops. Reading the best of the best can be intimidating. But also inspiring. And challenging. I have always had a problem with fresh, new sounding descriptions of everyday things. Like describing the sky; …
Thanks to Jason Kurtz for starting South Dakota Writes last spring. SDW has brought together hundreds of writers in South Dakota who meet up on Facebook and at in-person venues. They hosted a Winter Author Book Fair in Sioux Falls on Saturday, December 10, 2016. Caring Lessons was there! A very fun thing that happens …
Fall: a new season, a new home, a new town, a new everything. Now what? We spent our first three months in Sioux Falls getting settled in our twin home and often feeding our kids and grandkids whose kitchen was being remodeled. We’ve completed those tasks now, and I look out the window of our …
I spent last week at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival taking a class in writing essay, using process pedagogy and taught by Nancy Barry. Look at it this way: the writer explores (writes into) a topic, several iterations, to find out what they really want to write about, and the writer also uses feedback to …
Continue reading Writing Essay at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival – 2016
Since we're moving out of state, I will be at Printers Row Lit Fest for the last time with my book Caring Lessons: A Nursing Professor's Journey of Faith and Self. Date: Sunday, June 12, 2016 Time: 2-6pm Location:The first tent at the entrance to the Fest, corner of Congress Parkway and Dearborn, Chicago Writers Association …
Continue reading Caring Lessons at Printers Row Lit Fest for Last Time
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