Monday, November 26, 2018

Is Your Neighbor a Writer?

Do you know any local writers in your area? Do you enjoy reading and gifting books written by local authors? Are you in Seattle?

Words, Writers & West Seattle is a monthly reading series that introduces the community to the many local writers who live in this lovely part of town. I’m fortunate to be one of those writers!

Please join me on Thursday, December 13 at the beautiful new Southwest Library. I’ll be sharing my latest memoir, Mom’s Last Move. I hope you can come to this first public reading of this story of motherhood, memory loss, and becoming a writer.
 
Words, Writers & West Seattle
Southwest Branch – Seattle Public Library
9010 35th Avenue SW
Seattle, WA 98126
free parking available
Thursday, December 13, 2018
6:00 to 7:30 p.m.
 


Monday, November 5, 2018

New Release! - Mom's Last Move

Some stories seem to tell themselves. Others take years to complete. MOM’S LAST MOVE is a memoir that began as scribbles in a journal, scribbles scrawled in an attempt to make sense of life’s pain and chaos, scribbles that continued for the eleven years and twenty days between my father’s death on February 2, 2002 and that of my mother on February 22, 2013.
 
They were silent scribbles that simmered and sat in wait for that moment when I was able to see the story in the scribbles. Looking back, I’m unsure when the long process of creating memoir from scribbles began. Then there was more waiting as challenges were overcome, decisions were made, and publication was put in place. Fourteen years have passed since I began those first scribbles during the long nights and early mornings following Dad’s death.
MOM’S LAST MOVE is a story in three strands, like the three leaves of the Irish shamrock or the Triple Morrigan: crone-mother-maiden.
 
Mom is the focus of the primary strand. After publication of my first memoir, THE THIRTY-NINTH VICTIM, readers asked about my mother. Those gentle, concerned questions about a woman who had lost her partner of fifty-four years while also reliving the horror of her youngest child’s murder compelled me to share this story of motherhood. My mother was a woman I neither understood nor admired in the manner she deserved until she could no longer understand the depth of my love or the regret that held it.
 
The second strand of the story tells of my daughter’s journey through the tumultuous teens and my struggles to understand normalcy. I was overcome by unrealistic and unfounded fears for my daughter based on the unrelated and dissimilar reality of my youngest sister’s murder at nineteen, a murder solved twenty years later when my daughter was fourteen.
 
I explore my journey as a writer in the third strand. I didn’t begin writing until age forty-eight in direct response to the Gary Ridgway arrest and my father’s death two months later. I was a wreck. Writing was my salvation. THE THIRTY-NINTH VICTIM became my voice, a voice some in my family were not ready to hear. MOM’S LAST MOVE tells the story of conflict and love, of the strength of sibling bonds to overcome absolute disagreement.
 
MOM’S LAST MOVE is now available on Amazon. Your interest and readership mean the world. I hope my story resonates in unexpected ways. I hope you share it with friends and family. And, if you’re inclined, I hope you’ll consider a short scribble on Amazon to share your reading experience.