Jul 15, 2015

The Path of Grief Led to Places I Never Imagined

I never imagined fifteen years ago when my husband died suddenly at the age of 54, that I'd be a published author. It's a path I always wanted to follow and over the years we were married, John encouraged me to keep going. For several years I hosted a writer's group at the house which helped push me forward. Then when I went through my master's program for a degree in Curriculum and Instruction, John was behind me a hundred percent.

 After he died in 2000, I filled notebooks with the painful loss. Those notebook entries were the inspiration for my memoir, Twenty-Eight Snow Angels A Widow's Story of Love, Loss and Renewal. The book's helping other widows and widowers find meaning in life again. After publishing Twenty-Eight Snow Angels, I moved in a new writing direction. I filled notebooks with ideas for a novel. At a writer's conference in California, I read out a few pages of a draft of a WWII novel. With the constructive feedback from the people in the group, I came home excited to write a book. After three years of researching, writing and lots of starts and stops, my debut novel was published in July, 2015. Courageous Footsteps is a young adult historical novel, set in a Japanese internment camp during WWII. The story was inspired by a Japanese family that lived across from me in Minneapolis, Minnesota when I was a child.
As deep as that initial grief was and how dark life seemed, eventually the grief softened. With support and help from others, my life slowly found its purpose and direction. I carry the memories of my loving husband with me and always will. allowfullscreen>
Courageous Footsteps
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http://www.outskirtspress.com/footsteps