• Humor Noir/Black Humor

    While I was looking for something to read to my writing group, I came across this story. It brings back memories of how green I was when I started nursing school.   Right before Patsy’s turn to share her thoughts with the group, she smiled coyly at me. Oh no! She wasn’t going to tell…

  • Keeping Creative Juices Juicy

    A few years back I took an acrylic painting class. Sometimes, while the ever-present radio played a Mahler violin concerto, an aria from La Traviata or Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire, I would spin about whipping color on my canvas, feeling “in the zone.” My mind would disconnect from my hand, which moved independent of…

  • The Olden Days of Nursing

    “I would be in a sweat if I tried to maneuver out of that tight parking space without power steering,” I said to my 15-year-old grandson who is currently taking driver education. We had left the grocery store with a bottle of apple juice and two bags of pretzels. The parking lot was small and…

  • Luther

    I received my memoir manuscript from my editor this past week. Thankfully, she hadn’t any issues with structure. (I’m not counting the many grammatical errors she found that I thought I had addressed but still missed). Since the last version of my book, I have changed the title, dropped five chapters, deepened some others, and…

  • The Things I Treasure

    Tomorrow we are having the rooms on the second floor of our new townhouse painted. Before we moved furniture to the center of the rooms, I stored in a large cardboard box, out of harms way, the treasures I kept on the shelves of my desk. Among the various memorabilia I packed away were the…

  • PERSISTENCE

    Originally posted on Getting Older: Charting the Uncharted: In 2014, I finished my memoir. In spite of myself, I persisted and finished. Ten years ago, I left a full time nurse practitioner job and began to write in earnest. The book I just birthed is not the one I started then. It has been configured…