Life is a buzzing highway: adult children, grandchildren, aging parents—your own aging. How can we I’m a baby boomer and definitely a member of the sandwich generation.
The mother of three adult children, my husband John and I have been married for 40 years. Chicago born and raised, my various careers include high school English teacher, writer and copyeditor for two publishing companies, and registered nurse in women’s health. I am passionate about healthcare for women, children and the elderly. My 95-year-old mother suffers from dementia. Concerned about any sn
The mother of three adult children, my husband John and I have been married for 40 years. Chicago born and raised, my various careers include high school English teacher, writer and copyeditor for two publishing companies, and registered nurse in women’s health. I am passionate about healthcare for women, children and the elderly. My 95-year-old mother suffers from dementia. Concerned about any sn
Operating as usual
https://boomerhighway.org/the-girl-who-could-breathe-under-water/
Writers are fueled by many things: love of language, an eagerness to explore ideas and themes, the belief that well-wrought characters and a dexterity with words will speak to others, and maybe eve…
https://boomerhighway.org/george-harrisons-garden/
People can surprise us. When we hear the names of famous people: writers, politicians, scientists, musicians etc we picture them in the category where they are most known. But human beings are vari…
https://boomerhighway.org/novel-small-things-like-these/
This lovely novel (116 pages of beauty and sorrow) uses lilting language to gradually lead us to a message that the reader knows is coming. After all, Claire Keegan is Irish, the flow of her words …
https://boomerhighway.org/mini-review-writers-and-lovers/
I’m a writer. I write fiction. I am also a woman. In Lily King’s WRITERS AND LOVERS, her MC, Casey Peabody, has certainly had more lovers than I, but her novel is a song to me, a beauti…
https://boomerhighway.org/e-r-nurses-by-james-patterson-matt-eversmann/
I have always been fascinated by science and medicine, so much so that after my children were born and my youngest was ready to spend mornings with other children at daycare, I went bac…
https://boomerhighway.org/awakening-an-artists-sexual-visions/
In her first novel, Queen of the Owls, Barbara Linn Probst’s main character, Elizabeth, is not only married to lawyer Ben (whose life has to be planned hour to hour) and the mother of their t…
https://boomerhighway.org/the-lost-book-of-eleanor-dare/
If you have traveled to North Carolina, you may have visited the Museum of History and the exhibit dedicated to Virginia Dare, believed to be the daughter of Eleanor Dare, the first English child b…
https://boomerhighway.org/happy-new-year-2022/
Today, as a New Year begins, I want to thank all of you for reading my posts, for commenting and for helping me continue to be the writer I have always been. I’ve shared a lot of my life with…
https://boomerhighway.org/its-that-time-of-year-to-be-thankful-and-remember/
If Christmas lights a spark for my grandchildren, inspires them to dream of the future and desire the shiny-new and surprising—for me, Christmas is the vehicle of memory. As soon as I open th…
https://boomerhighway.org/fires/
My Aunt told us about a fire, speaking slowly to shake out the memory. I could see the row of newly built wooden houses, the smoke billowing while men struggled with hoses. She could see it …
https://boomerhighway.org/the-story-of-a-rug/
My maternal grandfather, Peter Rausch, was in the rug business. He worked for a large commercial venture in Chicago, the department store Marshall Fields, his position that of selling orient…
https://boomerhighway.org/december-voices-memories-and-giving/
The voice may be tenor or soprano. The music may be folk, modern or classical. Whatever your choice, it now begins—Christmas music reemerges as we celebrate the season in sound. We hum, sing …
https://boomerhighway.org/the-story-of-one-pregnant-patient-the-apgar-score/
Virginia Apgar Writer and physician Atul Gawande, reminds us in his book, BETTER, that much of modern medicine did not just happen—it came to be through trial and error, through the de…
https://boomerhighway.org/discussion-review-of-elizabeth-strout-and-oh-william/
In her latest novel, OH WILLIAM!–Lucy Barton, the main character and voice in the novel, tells us that when she learns William had been having an affair with her friend, “a tulip stem i…
https://boomerhighway.org/elizabeth-strout-how-she-came-to-be-a-favorite-author-part-one/
An author from Maine, now living and working in New York City, Elizabeth Strout published her debut novel, Amy and Isabelle, in 1998. The basic storyline echoed some unfortunate headlines, exa…
https://boomerhighway.org/my-index-to-autumn/
DEFINITION of INDEX: an alphabetical list of names, subjects, etc., typically found at the end of a book. AFTERNOON: angle of light in; soccer games in; time to rake leaves, walk in; A…
https://boomerhighway.org/relax-let-go-theres-goodness/
How do you let go of stress? Do you walk, run, indulge in a hobby? I’m a gardener, but I do love autumn, appreciate the end of things, the respite. I could say I just need a break, but becaus…
https://boomerhighway.org/the-greening-of-community-safety/
History: I am no sociologist, but for many years, riding the train from the suburbs into Chicago, I remember being uplifted and then discouraged by what I saw from the train’s windows. I beca…
https://boomerhighway.org/thoughts-on-where-we-are-autumn/
Autumn is approaching…with winds and light rains, leaves beginning to fall, crops being harvested, trees becoming barren. Ah, the cycle. These weather patterns contrast with the drought and …
https://boomerhighway.org/what-should-we-citizens-know-about-our-place-in-society/
Sometimes there are rewards when one goes into EVERNOTE and finds things. This was a response to a question that came in my email, but McSweeneys never responded. Oh well, dissed again…so I&…
https://boomerhighway.org/revisiting-thoughts-on-liminal-space/
After 9-11 life was totally altered, for all of us. As a writer, I sat and stared at my manuscript wondering if anyone would ever read a novel again. My husband had been traveling—not to New …
https://boomerhighway.org/mom-lessons-how-to-lead-a-good-life/
When my mother would gaze out at the late afternoon light, the golden afternoon she often called it, (a reference to a song lyric), she often become sad. “Why?” I once asked, and she ex…
https://boomerhighway.org/why-bidens-new-ruling-dates-back-to-1990s/
Barbara Fassbinder, one of the first health care professionals to be infected with the AIDS virus while on the job, died on Tuesday at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City. She…
https://boomerhighway.org/a-womans-biology-risk-and-guilt/
Because of their ability to conceive a child, give birth, perpetuate the species, women have for centuries been honored, sometimes considered saintly, but often buried too soon to live a full and c…
https://boomerhighway.org/medical-dramas-they-can-educate/
I like reading and sharing pieces I find in the NYTimes, Chicago Tribune, WSJ. THIS IS ONE OF THEM… the title of the piece: IN A TV SCRIPT, I CAN REWRITE A PATIENT’S FATE by Dani…
https://boomerhighway.org/a-gardeners-beginnings-another-chapter-in-my-story/
Some gardeners would say that a most enduring gift to offer a loved one would be a bouquet of blooms from their own patch of earth–red roses for passion, lilies for purity of heart, or some n…
https://boomerhighway.org/a-short-critique-of-modern-love-season-two/
Modern Love, short films based on stories sent to the New York Times, is back. Season Two. Minnie Driver kicks it of off with a charming story of a woman and the sleek sports car she loves to drive…
https://boomerhighway.org/a-house-full-of-windsors/
Sometimes you come across a novel that reminds you of your own personal proclivity (and to better explain: a tendency to choose or do something regularly; an inclination or predisposition toward a …
https://boomerhighway.org/memories-and-their-power/
“You have your wonderful memories,” people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the …fade…
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The happiness I feel most afternoons at my computer writing, creating, deleting and writing again--is blessed. This is me. This is my inner life, complimented by the books I choose to read, the words in reviews of other works I choose to underline, the ideas that grow in my mind and find their way to the page--on and on. Maybe one day I will want to be OUT THERE with my book. But right now, like two lovers, it's just me and my work.
Louise Erdrichwriters:In a tribal view of the world, where one place has been inhabited for generations, the landscape becomes enlivened by a sense of group and family history. ...a traditional storyteller fixes listeners in an unchanging landscape combined of myth and reality. People and place are inseparable.
To read more, go here: http://boomerhighway.org/where-i-should-be-a-writers-sense-of-place/
One of the best things about being a writer is meeting others writers and being online makes that even more possible. John J Kelley reads and comments on WRITER UNBOXED, as I do. That’s where I met him. We also belong to an online book club that is an offshoot of Writer Unboxed, call WU’s Breakout Novel Book Discussion. We read books that “broke out”--were read by thousands as soon as they hit the book stores. I’m enjoying John’s novel, the story of a WWI veteran whose sexual encounter with another soldier haunts him when he once again is living in Virginia and being encouraged to follow in the pre-determined footsteps of his father.
A writer friend and I exchanged ideas about the pitfalls of THE WORK. I wrote to him:
Since I reprinted and saved a comment you wrote to me that helped me on a down day, I hope that something here will do the same for you. Writing sometimes requires a meditative state. You work on your house chores but your characters are always with you. Or you want to escape to someone else’s novel and there is a word or an idea that sparks one in you. YOU ARE A WRITER and I know you will keep swimming. But it’s always in your power to decide what that looks like. Sometimes you can just hang out in the shallow end and not make yourself crazy with a power dive. Much writing comes from experience touched by creativity and your life follows that path.
And he wrote back: Beth – Consider the favor returned. This lovely little comment is packed full of life-wisdom. Yes to the meditative state, to my characters always being with me. Yes to the sparks that fly when we’re least expecting. Good point about deciding for ourselves what our writerly life looks like at any given moment along the way. And hella-yes to the fact that it’s derived from our experience and forges our path, both!
I always love your comments, but today’s is a gem among gems. Thank you!
And so it was a good day for THE WORK.
Writing about Claire Emmerling, a character in my novel, THE MOON DOCTOR, who experienced the absence of physical touch from her mother and often from her father. This altered her memories of her childhood. Once she found a photo of her father bending over her crib. She wished the photo could come alive, reveal if the man bent further and lifted her, nuzzled her tiny face and sniffed the perfume of her infant skin. Now in her forties, she meets Steven Arch and begins to accept him as a portent and sign pointing her in a direction where she will make things happen in her life and not only let things happen to her.
In the novel, Ana Farr gets these strange feelings where she focuses on her body, all aspects of her brain and senses, as if she were studying a map--though she is not on drugs. (In Cider House Rules, Dr. Larch is addicted to ether.) Steven Arch might need to help Ana discover why she has this focus and why she also thinks about death. Working on this concept: suffering is an irritant to all of us; it shapes us; and of course it shaped a seven-year-old boy scarred by a house fire who became a physician--Dr. Steven Arch. A symbol in the novel is a stag that appears and disappears, echoing where Steven Arch is.
TODAY, September 6th 2019, I came upon a note--true story. I was working over my usual 3-11 shift as a maternity RN. We were in the delivery room and struggling with a difficult delivery. The baby was born and moments later I went to chart the birth. I realized I wasn’t sure of the time of that birth. I began to sweat, worrying that down through the years on all official documents, the time of this child’s birth might be wrong--and thus the day wrong too. Was she born at 11:55 on a Friday or 12:01 on a Saturday. No one else had payed attention, all of us concerned about the health of the baby. I had to write down what the consensus of the time was, and console myself with this thought--mother and child were fine. And that was what mattered.
