Received numerous awards for short stories, flash fiction and personal essays. Short stories published in literary journals and periodicals, including Calliope, The Rambler and The Birmingham Arts Journal.
WORKS-IN-PROGRESS: NOVELS
ME and YOU, BILLY Semifinalist in 2002 Faulkner-Wisdom Novel-in-Progress Competition in New Orleans. Received 2004 1st Chapter of a Novel Contest award from Byline Magazine. Placed as a semifinalist in 2008 Faulkner-Wisdom Novel Competition.
Feisty and flawed Megan Kelly, a thirty-something bartender, concocts a plan to rescue her hard-drinking and homeless baby brother from himself. To leave the 1980s nightlife behind she must stop their three other siblings from selling their Alabama heritage. When Megan's confronted with an chance to secure the family land, will she step across a moral line, just-this-one-time, to save Billy, and ultimately, herself, or damn them both?
Megan's journey from barstool to bartender to bar-phobic illuminates the complicated facets of familial love, the why behind the suicide-on-the-installment-plan lifestyle of addiction, and how redemption surfaces in the most unlikely places.
A character-driven novel in progress, set in contemporary Deep South. Maggie McGuire, the co-owner of a hair salon in her late twenties, never cared about tracing her roots. The only child of an absentee dad and an emotionally vacant, perpetual hippie mom, Maggie felt connected to family only during the summers she spent with her mom's two sisters.
Now, transporting her mother's recently cremated ashes from New Orleans to her aunts' home in Alabama, Maggie's in a car accident that results in temporary-fix surgery and a frantic search for an organ donor, preferably her father. However, no one, not even her elderly aunts, seems to know his name, much less where to look for him.
Confined to a hospital-style bed at her aunts' home, armed with just a laptop, Maggie embarks on an Internet safari, guided by YeTree.net. On her trek she meets eclectic and eccentric co-hunters, each obsessed with tracking their own family's spoor, yet effusively helpful to novices. Will they enable Maggie to see the past clearly, instead of viewing her parents through the prism of her resentments, in time to save her own life?
WORKS-IN-PROGRESS: NONFICTION
WRITING to DEAL, HEAL, FULFILL: A Meditations Memoir
Introduction:Writing to Deal, Heal, Fulfill chronicles an expedition from self-employed at thirteen to unemployable at thirty-something, to a reinvented self as an award-winning writer in late-middle age.
Shortly after my thirty-third birthday, an accident totaled my car and halted my life. The injuries translated into permanently damaged knees, hips and back, and brought on fibromyalgia--an incurable, debilitating form of arthritis--which causes severe muscle pain and chronic exhaustion, resulting in a lifestyle of isolation.
Trekking through doctors' waiting rooms, a pain management clinic, arthritis seminars and chronic illness websites, I met fellow travelers hobbled by various physical conditions or emotional traumas. Neither medication, nor surgery, nor counseling provided the long-range help we needed to survive agonizing, sleep-deprived nights, much less participate in and enjoy daily life.
Dwindling finances, declining self-worth, unrelenting pain, limited mobility and an urgent need for hope transformed me from a bartender, secretarial temp worker and paralegal wannabe, to a writer. Journal entries about these experiences inspired fictional work, which resurrected a sense of humor and reconnected me to the world.
In the past decade, I've won a dozen fiction and nonfiction awards, published short stories, formed two writers groups, established contests for children, teens and adults, and mentored fiction and memoir writers from eighteen to eighty.
In critique groups, writers share struggles and solutions, help each other hone their craft, unearth a writing voice, develop faith in their talent and bolster their self-confidence on the long, twisty road to publication. Beginner and intermediate level writers have enriched my writing and my life, almost as much as my mentor and other multi-published authors.
This book stretches beyond face-to-face venues to pay forward those gifts. Each section contains two or more essays related to one of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Letting go of who you used to be yesterday, that person who exists only in your mind's eye today, involves a grieving process that eventually kicks open the door leading to tomorrow's you. I encourage both the casual and career writer to use the writing prompts at the end of each essay, either verbatim, or as motivators to explore wherever the pen takes you.
Although the degree of willingness to discover untapped strengths may fluctuate from day-to-day, no right or wrong answers exist to the questions within the prompts. What starts as private journal writing may develop into poems, essays, short stories, novels or memoirs. Regardless of your current writing skill level, the prompts offer inspiration and the essays offer empowerment to deal with your troubles, heal your wounds and create a fulfilling life.
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