Thank you for dropping by my site. If you were to walk into my actual
physical home, I would offer you tea or coffee and a listening ear. Since I
can’t provide those elements of hospitality via a website, I offer words
instead, and a glimpse into my life through my blog and writing. I’d love to
hear your thoughts in return.
I’m a former New Englander who has wound her way around this country from North to South, East to West, finally landing in the Midwest outside of Chicago but far from ocean breezes. My husband I have raised four sons together. We had two boys, tried for a girl and had twin boys. You know how those things go. But now our parenting season appears only in our rearview mirror, and I wake up each day looking for the new adventures because I know there will be plenty.
When I first started my blog a few years ago, I wasn’t feeling like myself because those four pieces of my heart had shot up into men and flown to other cities, states, and countries away from me. Writing helped distract me, and it helped me to process the inevitable changes of life. I named the blog An Opsimath’s Journey. An opsimath is a person who continues to learn late in life, and I was enrolled in a creative writing program late in life to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop. I always wanted a creative writing degree but in my late teens and twenties it sounded useless and frivolous. What do you DO with a creative writing degree? So I attended Florida State University and studied Communications, focusing on Film and Television….and learned that I still wanted that creative writing degree.
In my past life, I’ve worked as a television engineer, taught writing at a community college, and wrote in a freelance capacity. Today I work a part-time job with a publisher while trying to write essays and novels.
I am the author of a novel called The Forgotten Life of Eva Gordon (Kregel, 2022) about a mish-mash of people and age groups all coming together to help an older woman who is slipping into dementia and simply wants to return to the safety of her past. I can relate (not to the dementia piece—yet). And my middle-grade novel, Hotel, Oscar, Mike, Echo, comes out in June of 2023. It’s about a young girl and her mom living in a transitional home for women and their families coming out of homelessness. The girl is waiting for the fulfillment of a silent promise she heard about finding a real home.
I’m so deeply grateful that you stopped by. Please come again!
“… stories are built when you string a few words together to form a sentence that build a paragraph that in time form a chapter until you suddenly find you’ve written 300 pages—brick by brick.” ~ Linda MacKillop
Publications
The Redbud Post
February 1, 2017: A Questionnaire to My Estranged Mother
Mudroom Blog
June 7, 2017: Spoken Blessings
The Redbud Post
August 1, 2017: The Family Recipe
Under the Sun
August, 2017: So Much Sky
(nominated for a Pushcart Prize)
More to Life Magazine
May, 2022: Healing Broken Relationships
“As long as I show up faithfully and put words on paper—small or large amounts of words—a novel, short story, or anything can appear—brick by brick.” ~ Linda MacKillop
