*image credit Richard McCoy via http://www.universetoday.com
Here’s another excerpt from one of my Paradiso interviews. This one hits particularly close to home for me; I’ll let you know why at the end of the interview.
Early Life
I’ll start like Dickens: I was born. I was born in Dayton, Ohio. My first event that probably did influence my entire life happened when I was about 6 weeks old. My parents put me in a large double bed, and I was a very very strong baby at the time—unusually so. I was unhappy about the situation: I dug my heels into the bed, went over the side—at this point it was a very high double-bed, fractured my skull, and I was not expected to live through the night. I don’t know if it resulted in me being left-handed, but probably stuttering throughout childhood. I had my first-grade teacher tie my arm to my side in order to change me to the right-handedness, and that was very traumatic. I hated school. Especially 1st grade, and especially Miss Peacock, that was her name. I never forgot her. You know, it’s amazing how we never forget our terrible teachers. And she was kind of a short, dumpy woman with dyed red hair, you know, awful. And I had learned to read pretty early in my life, and she did not…it wasn’t according to her method, so… Oh, it was awful.
I was so bored, but things picked up throughout my school life, I guess. I was a shy child, backward socially because of the stutter. I overcame the stutter by going into drama in high school. I found that if I could pretend to be somebody else, I never stuttered. It was only when I had to represent myself, as in a book report, that I would stutter and get very very red, and shake just like a leaf, you know, just like that. But if I could be Mary in the Crucible, suddenly I could be just this whole different persona, and I never stuttered, and I could do monologues, everything. And that was a revelation to me. So when I, in my working life when I went into the computer field, the medical computer field, I helped develop an algorithm to detect heart arrhythmias, like for a bedside monitor and other heart equipment…I found that when I gave presentations, if I could just pretend to be somebody else and visualize, in my head, that I could speak before one person or a hundred people. It didn’t matter. I could not—and I still can’t, I have a hard time standing up in front of people representing myself. I always have to imagine somebody else or I start to stutter. And it still comes out when I am either very angry and can’t get the words out—if they come out, they stutter—or if I’m very tired. But that was probably the thing that influenced the stuttering.
I followed several directions in my life. I became much more introverted than I already was, um, and writing. You don’t stutter when you write, you know, so I figured that’s what someday I will do. And it was a long, circuitous route before I actually became a writer. You know, I’ve always written throughout my life, but before I became a published, recognized writer. I even have a fan club. So…but…um, I guess that’s probably the short and sweet of it.
Marriage
I married when I was twenty-three years old. I was married for 33 years before getting divorced in 2003. And then packed up my stuff, the most important things, and headed from Spokane to Little River, CA, which is south of Mendocino, which is on the coast of Northern California. I wrote for about a year, and then met my current husband online, corresponded. That’s really a different way to meet people, but that’s what’s happening now. You just have to be really careful, because people can be anything they want. He was real consistent in his emails—how he wrote, that’s what I watched for. Any inconsistencies, you know, that like covering up a lie, or something that was said two weeks ago and I didn’t remember…I saved all of that and would compare. I was really very, very careful that way. So we got married, and it’s been less than two years now. Our second wedding anniversary will be November 8th. And it turned out that we got married at a very magical time. How we got married—in Mendocino. And at that time, heaven aligned, there was a full moon, there was, um, I don’t know if it was Jupiter or Mars that lined up, but it was a very rare astrological event. And then on top of everything there was a wonderful storm off the coast of Mendocino. Lightning, thunder, lots of drama. And it was just fantastic. If I were in Scotland or Ireland at the time…you know, it felt like I should be at one of the standing stones or that something significant was really happening. I mean, it was—we got married.
I am attending Goddard College, pursuing an MFA in writing. I am writing short stories, plus comic scripts. Comic scripts are both interesting and frustrating to write. For one thing, I am unsure of how much panel designation to write out and how much to leave to the artist. It’s something I’ll end up developing as a work with artists, I expect.
