An athlete, an artist, a musician, a free spirit, a dreamer, a Renaissance person, and an anthropologist at heart, I am all these things, but I am also a writer. The anthropologist in me wonders which ancestor passed down each of these traits, however, I don’t have to dig deeply into my DNA to discover where my passion for writing came from. I only need to look one generation back at the face of my mother.
My time with her was brief—only 18 years—as she died suddenly during my freshman year in college. I had always been aware of her love of penning poems and short stories, something she did as a teen and young woman, but sadly, once married, she put down her pen.
As I entered adulthood, my own passion for writing blossomed. With many short stories and poems under my belt, I turned my focus to writing feature articles for local newspapers. Taking the next leap, I wrote my first novel, Daughter of Two Worlds: The Face of My Father, and coauthored the memoir of my judo coach, Never Give Up: A Journey from Bully to Brave. Presently, I have completed the sequel to my novel, which will be published soon, and am working on an historical novel. However, for a moment, I will put my pen down, so that I can pick up hers.
Tucked away in my files was a small composition book, yellowed by the years. Carefully opening my mother’s book of poems and prose, several loose papers, nestled between the pages, caught my attention. Six typewritten pages, neatly folded together, appear to be the start of a novel, and one single page, typed, fragile, and yellow, is a poem, and it’s the poem that I want to share with the world. Read more