Recollections published in the Recorder, Fall 2003

I started writing these memoir pieces in 1997, when I submitted my account of a visit to Marblehead to a St. Louis hobby magazine. I picked it up again after my mother died in 2000. In 2003 The Recorder, published by the Irish-American Historical Society, printed some of my father’s recollections along with an introduction I wrote. After my retirement in 2005 I began taking writing and other classes at Washington University’s Lifelong Learning Institute (LLI). And In June 2007, I attended the Washington University Summer Writers Institute.

My grandfather had written a short memoir, Growing Up In Norway, and with his inspiration, I began writing my own. It is now in second draft form and I hope to polish it enough over the coming academic year to submit it to literary agents.

I teach night school courses at Washington University in the fall, winter and spring which limits most of my writing to the summer when I have time. Last summer The Marblehead Reporter published a short piece about an eccentric woman I knew growing up there. I’ve submitted five more articles to the Reporter which I hope they will publish over the course of the year while I’m teaching.

I get great feedback on my writing from fellow Washington University Lifelong Learning students and from members of another group I joined at a bookstore in St. Louis.

Next week: Writers in my family and my connection to The New Yorker.