🎧 An Unlikely Marriage Sparked My Writing Journey. What about you?
When Love Leads to Literature
Welcome into Flight School:
When did your creative writing journey begin? For me, it started with a guy named Steve.
The Collision of Opposites
We were an American mix-match. Me with a passionate nature. Him with a stark laconicism. Me with a focused intensity. Him with a laid-back-party-boy-why-are-you-so-uptight-chill. Me with a complex past that included moving twenty-seven times by the time I was twenty. Him with a static past where he grew up in one place and never moved when I met him on his twenty-seventh birthday!
Why we were drawn to each other I will never know. It’s one of the great mysteries I have yet to solve. But there it was. I loved this guy. He was my “one.”
The Turning Point
When he asked me to marry him, I knew he wanted the full American dream: Home ownership, a 401K, a couple of reliable cars, a couple kids, and (for both of us) steady jobs.
I was okay having a reliable car (how else to hit the road in a hurry) but a house? Investments? Kids? No. No. No. As for a steady job, forget that! I had once been a forty-hour-a-week-worker-bee as an investigative reporter. I left that job to work a far more lucrative gig as a freelance PR consultant. I’d never be locked down again.
The Unexpected Gift
A different woman might have said, “No. Pass. We’re not right for each other,” and let Steve go but as Jane Eyre wrote: “Reader, I married him.” And my “I do” opened a door to five published books, international bestseller status, and to understanding the profound power of storytelling to illuminate our lives.
Your Turn
Every writer's journey starts with a moment of recognition - that instant when putting words on paper becomes not just an act, but a calling.
✍️ Share Your Catalyst: What moment called you to creative writing? Join our community of truth-seekers and storytellers in the comments. I’ll see you there,
~ Jennifer 🐦⬛
Back in 2009, I left the Marine Corps a disabled veteran and had been introduced to painting as a therapeutic practice to help manage my chronic pain and its underlying elements. "Paint whatever makes you happy," they'd say to me, and so I chose sea turtles; they make me happy.
Painting ushered me through the ups and downs of a botched early-life marriage and divorce at 27 and the slew of life's hardships that followed. The happiness of the sea turtles carried me on their wings, and the therapy evolved from painting to variations of psychological modalities, the reckoning of abuse from childhood, the searching for truth in therapy rooms and self-help books, and facing the moral inventory of my 'self,’ making space for its ego death and surrendering to greater spirituality.
I landed in 2017 with a renewed sense of being and discovered my love for sea turtle wings actually related to literal flying, so I listened and trusted myself; I flew. My path of following my passion led me to a flight instructor who swept me off my feet, and now we're married and have a baby girl; we named her Adena.
Adena burst open within me a prioritization of inner-knowing and self-revolution. She empowered me to erect a firewall of fierce boundaries from my old life and the abusive family relationships, which needed to be lovingly detached and properly distanced. Adena now blesses me with a daily reckoning of past-life coping mechanisms which no longer serve me.
The ego death triggered the painted sea turtles to suddenly fly free and disappear into the deep blue abyss. I felt as if I were floating in it -the abyss- now devoid of the joyful beacon I once relied on for navigation, lost in a sea of nothingness. Some would call this postpartum depression. I call it divine intervention.
My desperation led me to Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way" last November, which helped uncover my inner secret. I had hidden from myself my want to be a writer after getting in trouble in the first grade for writing a book when I should have been paying attention to the lecture. In January (this year, 2022), I hopped on google and found the Blackbird Studio. I signed up for Bones of Storytelling and continued to listen to the faint voice of my inner child from first grade who continues to whisper, “write.”
Hello, everyone, I am Julia, and I am a writer.
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My mother was named Rosemarie Jeanne’ at birth.
When I was five, she gave my brother and I a roll of pennies. She told us to call her Ginger. Every time we called her mom, she took a penny. I called her Ginger most of my life.
I was named Rosemarie Jeanne’. That was what my father wanted. That’s the name that went on the birth certificate. Since the day I was born my mother called me Tracy. Everybody calls me Tracy. (Except my husband, he calls me Pinky : )
Ginger was a writer. She wrote poems and short memoir prose. Years into a project of putting her poems and prose together for a book, my mom passed on, book unfinished. Her desire was to be a beacon of hope and light to others that may have suffered a tragic childhood and survived to tell the tale.
I decided to take the project on. I would finish putting Ginger’s book together. As I started sorting through and organizing what she had completed and what she was still working on, the enormity of the task hit me full force. I ran straight into my own messy, tangled life. I couldn’t deal with my mother’s story until I faced mine.
When I was nine Ginger gave me my first diary. I’ve journaled off and on throughout my life ever since. I’ve written many poems and even songs. Now, at fifty, I was going to get serious and write memoir. So, I signed up for a seven week online memoir writing class. I loved it! I took a couple more. Being in the class structure helped to keep me focused and on task. Then my life took some interesting twists and turns and the writing project took a backseat. I have speculated on the inner workings of what that was really all about but will save that for later. For now, it’s been ten years since I started the project, seven since I set it down. Lately I have been feeling the tug, a whisper in my ear, “it’s time”……time to pick it back up……..
So here I am : )
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