AUTHOR NOTE, 05/20/14: Wrong? I was wrong?! A friend pointed out that the narrator in The Book Thief is not God, as I--I can only say--hoped, but is the Angel of Death. I'm leaving my original post as is, because A) it's not the first time I've been wrong, and it certainly won't be the last, and B) I think it brings up an important discussion about art and interpretation. Each of us appreciates and interprets what we, as individuals, need to receive when we take in art. When we put something out there for the public to consume, it becomes theirs to read into what they will and what they need.

Clearly I need to watch The Book Thief again. Better yet, I need to read the book!

Knowing the truth, hope still lives for me: I mean, if we can make Death appreciate life, then writing books is something we need to keep doing. Which is--I could be wrong, but I suspect--what the story is all about.


Writing has become my way to salvation--my way to myself. I can no more imagine my life without writing than I can imagine my life without my family, or without an appendage I've been accustomed to using my whole life.

For those of you local to southwest Michigan who have followed my journey as a writer and thought, "me too ... someday." That day is here.

Editor, full-time working writer, and friend, Ami Hendrickson, and I are here to support you, inspire you, light a fire under you—to help YOU make someday today.

We're holding a free, no obligation informational meeting to introduce you to our joint endeavor, #Write2TheEnd Writers Workshop™. On Wednesday, May 28, at 6:30 pm, in the old Masonic Temple, downtown St. Joe, at the corner of Elm & Main (420 Main St.), we will give you an overview of our syllabus and answer any questions you may have. In addition, you will leave with a small sample of what's to come; a mini-tool you can employ immediately to help move your writing from parked to forward.

I've overcome and come to own the permission and the soul pieces of writing for myself, and I believe I can help you do the same. I can assist with transformational writing, with essays, persuasive writing, blogging, and memoir. I can also help you see the value in being open to coaching, which I believe is one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves. It’s difficult to be objective about our own creative endeavors. It’s easy to fall in love with our own words. Someone who truly has our best interests at heart—who believes in us—is invaluable in helping us see our goals to fruition. And seriously, Ami blew my mind when she introduced me to our first get-it-done tool. The tools, the HOW, the discipline, the next steps, that's what I need and I look forward to digging in to what Ami has to share, right beside you.

If you're thinking, "this summer just isn't the time," then perhaps you need to either give yourself permission to let go of your dreams of being a writer and move on to something else wonderful & fulfilling—but please do move on and actually do something else—or give yourself permission to take this course and see what you can accomplish right now. Chances are, if this opportunity appeals to you and you let it pass, someday will never come. The excuses only get better, believe me. 

But consider this: how many summers have gone by since you first dreamed of writing that great American novel or memoir or screenplay or stageplay, or since you’ve let a completed project fester in a drawer? This is the summer you could turn dreaming into finishing--into writing to The End--Your End. If you could do it yourself, you would have by now. You need a team, a tribe of like-minded individuals to help you succeed in the goals we share.

Is your life worth less than mine? Is it worth less than your mother's, your father's, than your child's? There are many ways to support and to parent and to care for others. Ami and I agree that caring for ourselves—that leading fulfilling, joy-filled lives—is an important way to care for those we love, and provides a beautiful example for our children, and the joyful lives we hope they grow to lead.  

Nowhere else will you get such a powerful combination of tools, know-how, practical and functional writing advice, combined with the coaching and inspiration that will help you overcome your writing hurdles. There's a reason Ami and I have found one another. We each fill the other's gaps in ways that can help turn YOU into a powerful FINISHER where your writing goals are concerned. 

We want this for you. We want this for you badly enough that we’re willing to give you back $100 at the end of the eight weeks when you meet the goal you set on the first night. But we can't want it more than you want it.

Have you seen the movie, The Book Thief? I strongly recommend it, particularly for writers.

"She was one of the few souls that made me wonder what is was to live"..."The only truth I truly know is that I am haunted by humans." –God, “Himself,” as a truly omniscient narrator in, The Book Thief.

If we are to believe the story, God's effort to know all life’s ups and downs lives in our suffering and comes alive in our writing. It is only through our words that He can know the sun on His face, the persistent ache of losing a loved one, the consuming bliss of loving, being loved and making love. God can only feel the wretchedness of love lost through our writing.

Our compulsion to write, then, serves God--or the Universe, or whatever you wish to call it—or not. Regardless of any higher power, through our story we gift others. 

God giveth and He taketh away. We suffer and we write: to help God know what it is to live and to help others navigate their lives through their struggles, to fully experience and relive and lend a frame to their joys. Or perhaps we write purely to entertain, but that has value, too.

I can't recall watching a movie that moved me as much as The Book Thief. Framed in the expected horrors and the unimagined gifts of Nazi Germany, it tells the story of a girl who experiences so much loss and death, but in whose writing humanity lives. The acting is as glorious as the writing, and they play together, haunting and true like a cello in the hands of a master.  

The Book Thief celebrates books and writing and it makes me wear the title of writer like a badge of honor, like a testament to a life lived. It makes me eager to keep doing both.

Liesel was meant to write for Max. You were meant to write for someone. I was meant to write for someone. There will always be those with more experience, more education, or someone loftier for whom the words appear to come more easily. That's fine. They will write for their someones. Don't let that keep you from writing for yours. Know that it is only through writing for ourselves that we can impact, transform, and truly haunt others in all the best ways.

The human experience is rife with layers and levels, with soaring catastrophe and bottomless joy. It is our duty as writers to paint our understanding for others—for humanity to experience through us. I hope you will consider completing your dream project with #Write2TheEnd this summer.

Join our Facebook group, even if you’re not local to southwest Michigan, for free writing tips, engaging discussion, and inspirational posts. And please, if you’re able, join us in person on Wednesday, May 28th. We look forward to welcoming you, and any writer friends you’d like to bring along.

Here’s to writing to The End. Your End. 
--Kim Jorgensen Gane, (c) 2014, all rights reserved


#Write2TheEnd Writers Workshop(TM) is a MuseInks / GANE Possible Production, Copyright (C) 2014, All Rights Reserved.

Join the Facebook group for writerly info & free writing tips:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/Write2TheEnd/
Check out the #Write2TheEnd Blog:  http://write2theend.blogspot.com

My e-mail icon is at the tippy top of this page.

Dear Judy,

In Grade 4, I was Sheila the Great.

I’m not kidding.

Despite my fuzzy hair and brown skin, I was convinced you had me in mind when you wrote the novel.

I was also Margaret and Tony and Peter.

I started a newspaper at my school in grade 4 because of your books.  I dreamed of being a writer because of your books.

And because at first I wasn’t sure how to do that, some of my earliest writings are letters to my grandmother that were copied almost verbatim from various pages of your novels.

Yes, I plagiarized you at the age of 10.

I apologize.

But I’m not sorry because those letters were never sent and 30 years later, my mother delivered them to me along with a host of other childhood silliness and the joy and tears that resulted from reading my words – your words- are worth any sanctions you may have to take.

What you gave me was a gift; an outlet.

I was a first generation Canadian kid with Jamaican parents trying to find my way through the school system. I didn’t understand cliques or bras. I didn’t know what questions to ask until you came along.

You gave me a guideline to being normally abnormal that has guided the rest of my life.

When my mother bought me “Letters to Judy: What your kids wish they could tell you.” I was insanely jealous of the fact that these kids had written to you and that you were responding.

I was far too in awe to have thought of sending my thoughts as well.

So now that I have the chance here’s what I’d like to thank you for:

Are you There God It’s me Margaret : It led to an awkward conversation between a father and daughter when I snuck up behind him to ask what a “period” was and “how I could get one.”  Good times.

Forever: The sneaky way you didn’t announce that this book wasn’t like the others, allowing me a full fifteen minutes of jaw-on-the-ground reading heaven before my mother came bounding up the stairs after getting a tip off from another parent. I’d also like to thank my mom for always hiding the “not until you’re older” book  in the same spot allowing me to continue my reading on the sly.

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing:  For giving me insight into the world of a boy, giving me something great I can share with my sons so they can get to know you too and siding with me in the acknowledgment that baby brothers were put on this earth to test your sanity.

Thank you for Iggie’s House that had a character that looked like me, and for Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, Blubber, Then Again Maybe I won’t, Tiger Eyes and all the others that kept me up way past my bedtime, flashlight in hand.

All those years ago when I thought there was no one who understood me, you popped in with characters that have stayed with me my entire life.

I’m so glad to have the chance to finally write the letter I couldn’t all those years ago.

Your pal,

Heather

aka Sheila the Great


Heather Greenwood Davis is an award-winning feature writer with more than 20 years of journalism experience.  Her stories have appeared in numerous publications including most recently the June issue of "O" The Oprah Winfrey Magazine.  A yearlong trip around the world last year with her husband and two sons (ages 6 and 8) led to the family being named National Geographic Traveler Magazine "Travelers of the Year."  Stories of their travels and lessons learned also appear online at www.globetrottingmama.com.

Heather thanked US for the chance to purge her soul, but we couldn't be more grateful to her for sharing her memories of growing up with Judy Blume.  I couldn't be more grateful that she permitted me to share it with you as a guest post on my blog, and it ain't over, folks!  We welcome you to do the same or to participate via your own blog!  UPDATE:  Find out everything you need to know to participate ON THE #JudyBlumeProject PAGE!!

Copyright © 2013 Heather Greenwood Davis.  All rights reserved.  Reprinted with permission from the author.

Enjoy this moment in time #JudyBlumeProject piece by Denise DiFulco, writer/editor/author, at denisedifulco.com.


It’s the period book. Everyone calls it that. They never say its awkward, seven-word title. But also, that’s what it is: the period book. The one where the girl gets her period. And a bra.

I am 11 years old. I have neither my period, nor a bra. But I want to read the period book. Everyone is reading the period book. All they talk about is the period book. If I don’t read the period book, they certainly will talk about me.

Mom hasn’t yet pulled me into the basement, as she one day will, to talk about “it.” Not the just small “it”—the period “it”—but the big “it.” After a conversation where I declare I know what “it” is, she won’t say we need to talk about “it.” Instead she’ll tell me, “We need to talk about the birds and the bees.”

I know nothing about birds and bees and what they have to do with “it.” What I do know, I’ve learned from the other book. “The Book.” The one about the big “it.”

Finding “The Book,” the big “it” book, isn’t so easy. It’s not in the school library. It never would be in the school library. There are two copies at the public library.

This I know.

They sit atop a revolving rack—steps away from the librarian’s desk—some corner of their covers shorn away, spines bowed into an arch. On the front, a picture of a locket, suggesting the secrets within. I spin the rack, inspect the book about the fat girl, glance toward the desk. She’s looking down. Another turn. The locket reappears. A second check to be sure, only this time she smiles. I walk away.

Weeks pass and the girls at school are whispering and giggling in the halls. I, too, want to trade in whispers and giggles. I want to know what they know.

One day as I arrive at my fifth-grade desk, a friend shoves her hand into my knapsack. “Here,” she says. “Don’t tell anyone.”

I peer inside. It is “The Book.” The book about the big “it.”

The locket is half torn from the cover, but the contents are intact. I tuck it inside my desk to read the first page, then the second, then the third. Class has begun. I draw my loose-leaf binder over the lip of the table, the bottom edge of “The Book” resting on my thighs. The teacher is speaking, and the class learning something, I am sure. I am learning, too.

Next day I re-establish my cover: Binder pulled out, book beneath, resting on the edge of the tray. Its spine is so well-worn pages seem to unfold themselves. I am opening with them— following the words into another room—so when the teacher calls on me, I don’t answer. She walks around my desk, and as I realize this, I allow the binder to slip over my lap. She does not see.

Yes, I am learning.

Next time I’m more careful. I raise my hand. Answer questions. Look down thoughtfully. Continue my education.

By the time the bell rings, I, too, can whisper and giggle, trade in information so precious and rare no one dares speak its name. Somehow I am changed, though real change is far away. Many questions answered and so much yet to know. Like the noises. What are the noises?

I know they are important. There is no one to ask.

Denise DiFulco is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, Martha Stewart Living and numerous print and online publications. She currently is working on her first novel—loosely based on family history—which chronicles the life of a Jewish man who leaves Nazi Germany and renounces his identity only to find he can’t escape his past. Denise is blogging about her fiction writing at her recently launched blog, Setting Anchor, Setting Sail: A Writer’s Journey.

I'm SO very grateful to Denise for allowing me to share her story here! 

Copyright © 2013 Denise DiFulco.  All rights reserved.  Reprinted with permission from the author.

Some of Dana’s readers said SHE should be the next Judy Blume.  I agreed, and suggested she create an anthology in Judy Blume’s honor.  Because of that brief exchange, Dana and I are collaborating on this crazy, beautiful Judy Blume Project (#JudyBlumeProject), for which, I have a feeling, we will forevermore be grateful.

Judy Blume:  prolific and iconic author, surrogate mother, surrogate best friend and confidant to women and men in the most difficult of their growing up years, through many of life’s most tumultuous situations.  Who knows what the real Judy is like, but between her pages, she offers a soft breast to rest your troubled head upon, like the grandmother you miss so desperately.  She offers a kick in the pants like the best friend who always tells you the truth; honesty, always honesty, without restraint or judgment.  And most importantly, Judy always lets you know that you’re perfect and normal, and perfectly normal, just the way you are.  The same stuff your mom always told you, but you didn’t believe because she had to love you, she was your mom; and no one else ever would.

No one’s likely to tap you on the shoulder to tell you flat out that this is the magic you’ve been waiting for.  When it comes, you’d better believe in it; believe in yourself and believe in the possibility that it could happen to you, on a regular old Tuesday.  This could be your Tuesday…your moment.

If you’re lucky, you know when you come upon your destiny—you know when someone is meant to come into your life, and that something beautiful will happen as a result. I don’t know whether there will ever come a penny from this project upon which we’re embarking, but I do know that it will be life-changing in ways that transcend the concrete.  I can’t thank Heather enough for being her Extraordinary Ordinary self and providing a platform for something like this to happen.  And I can’t thank Dana enough for taking me along in this dust-kicking convertible that could totally be headed off a cliff.

What a ride it’s sure to be.  I’m leaning in.  With everything I have, I’m leaning in.


Follow along to see what happens on The Judy Bloom Project Facebook Page.


Guidelines to SUBMIT YOUR OWN PIECE can be found on the #JudyBlumeProject WEBPAGE!


...This could be YOUR Tuesday.

Please tell me in the comments what Judy Blume meant to you, and consider throwing in your proverbial hat.

AUTHOR NOTE:  Please be advised, this may contain a trigger for single mothers (parents).  But its intent is to convey and contain hope.  It gets better.  Updating for the Suicide Awareness and Prevention Blog Carnival.  Follow along at #SABD13 (and check out what the tweeps were tweeting about).  I'm also linking up for Suicide Prevention Day with Time Warp Tuesday on Bereaved and Blessed, for their theme this month: Learning.  This is definitely reflective of what I've learned since my daughter was this little peanut.  

AUTHOR UPDATE 05/13/14:  I performed this piece for Listen to Your Mother 2014 in Northwest Indiana. You can view my performance and those of my fellow cast members (and countless others that took place in 32 cities across the US) on the Listen to Your Mother YouTube channel.

I had a recurring nightmare as a child:  It started with my brother and me sitting in a parking lot in my mother’s Pink Panther pink ’69 Mustang convertible. Its white ragtop was down, and its rumble seat was hidden away in the trunk. 

The parking lot was outside a crumbling brick building in a southwest Chicago suburb, near where we lived for a couple of years when I was in elementary school.  My mom was my Brownie leader.  Once, she left us in the car when she ran in to buy patches.  I’m sure it wasn’t that bad of a neighborhood, but it’s also where a mentally disabled man-child tried to kiss her outside a convenience store.  Compared to where we came from, this had a lasting imprint on me.

My brother had once hooked his diapered behind to the gear shifter in my mom’s old car.  It tumbled down the dirt driveway at my grandparents’ with her running after it, shouting at no one, “Stop, Stop!” After my brother dove out the window, she managed to jump in and the old green Ford Torino lurched to a stop.  My mother’s white knuckles and heaving breaths are still vivid through the dappled windshield.  I suppose I had a well-hidden desire to rescue my little brother from that.  

So, my recurring dream took the two of us from that parking lot near Chicago, to a familiar street.  All of a sudden, we’re bouncing along the bluff in our quaint lakeside hometown across Lake Michigan.  I am in third grade; my brother is in first.  I am behind the wheel of that Pink Panther Pink Mustang convertible and we’re careening and hanging on for dear life, until I can’t keep control on a curve and we go sailing off the cliff, into oblivion. 

Each time I woke, sweating, frightened, and feeling like a failure.

A condition that is oft repeated years later when I’m a single mom, trying to survive with a delightful, sparkly-eyed little toddler to care for.  Alone in my conservative hometown.  With no child support. 

After much convincing, my mother had co-signed a lease for me and my daughter to escape the 1200 square foot house we’d shared with her and her second husband, three dogs, two cats, and my skooching infant half brother who came a year and nine days after my daughter. 

I moved us into a back alley apartment downtown.  It had one bedroom, just wide enough for my daughter’s twin-size bed on the floor and an old cane rocking chair from my mother. The room was long and narrow.  Her changing-table-turned-dresser occupied one wall, and an overloaded pink metal bookshelf stood just inside the doorway.  There was little room for her to play on the floor, and no carpet to cover the distressed hardwood.  I read to her in the cane rocker every night before bed, where her projectile spit-up still crusted underneath the swooping wooden arms. 

I’d hand-stitched a pink balloon valance for my daughter’s room, a blue one for our living room that doubled as my bedroom, and stayed up for almost an entire weekend straight to hand-stitch a blue-flowered comforter for myself.  I have it in the guest room to this day.  My daughters and their husbands sleep under it when they come to visit from their respective homes in Minnesota and New Mexico.  My daughter used to curl up under it on the pullout couch with me.  She’d watch Looney-Tunes on Saturday mornings while I slept in. 

She’d curl up in my lap on the bathroom floor, and lift my tear-streaked face, and say, “Wudge you, Momma.” 

It was so hard.  Paying for daycare.  Keeping the lights on, which I didn’t always.  Keeping the heat going. 

And the loneliness. 

A cavernous loneliness from working and earning never enough; from returning bottles and cans from my dad’s office for their 5-cent deposit to buy bread and milk and eggs to feed my little girl; from raiding my dad’s change jar for quarters to go to the Laundromat to wash our clothes. 

There were boyfriends on occasion. We both had our hearts broken more than once before we met the man she would eventually call Daddy.  Who walked her down the aisle and cried at her wedding and danced with her under a spotlight into her husband’s waiting arms.  He gave her an equally impish and delightful stepsister to grow up with, for us to love and to be the only person who could properly send her off to married life with the perfect Maid of Honor RAP.

Since my husband’s daughter, younger by exactly two Januarys, stepped into my daughter's room and said, "This place is a mess," they've shared every birthday.  They've shared Barbies®, Practical Magic, potions, and pets.  They've whispered under covers and behind closed doors, over phone lines and across air.   They've rescued one another from childhood loneliness, and young adult mishap.  They welcomed a long-sought brother into their teenaged lives, whose baby’s breath, sweet, meaty little hands and nighttime cries provided an excellent source of birth control.  

Just like their father and I, my daughters are bonded by so much more than blood.  They're bonded by history.  We're all bonded by exactly what the other needed at precisely the right time.

So, what if…?

What if the recurring nightmare I would remember years later while driving my toddler around that same curve in my 1981 Dodge Omni with no radio; sucking her binky and clutching her soft yellow blankie, her trusting eyes watching me in the rearview…what if instead of putting on the breaks and slowing down and taking that same curve cautiously during a blazing snow-storm and thinking time and again through my tears that long winter that I couldn’t possibly do it without her—to leave her with a lifetime of thinking it was her fault?  What if I’d closed my eyes, took my hands off the wheel and decided to just drive into that icy lake?

But I couldn’t do it with her either.  She was too precious.  Too beautiful.  Too full of life and possible and hugs and Wudge You Mommas.  I needed her, and she needed me, and she saved my life in more ways than I can count.  But it was all so much more than one girl should have been asked to carry on her tiny shoulders. 

We made it through that winter, and another, and another after that.  We made it through me losing a job, and my car getting repossessed, and quietly not being able to pay rent the winter after we met her daddy and her sister.  We made it to the day we moved into a new place with them when I saw the weight of more than two thousand days before float off her shoulders with the imagination of two little girls, who were both for once, just being kids.  They were playing with the dollhouse my Gramps had made her on the floor in her new bedroom, which had room enough for two small girls, with the same birthday two years apart, to sprawl out on their bellies.

Thank God I didn’t…Just Drive.

AUTHOR UPDATE 03/16/13:  I read a blog post today by Les Floyd on the topic of Suicide and Cowardice.  In the comments I shared a link to this one, because it's certainly relevant, and I added what Kathryn and I said below about driving through life's challenges, because you never know what has the potential to be beautiful around that next turn. 

I gave a talk a couple weeks ago to the Depression and Bipolar Alliance, about the relationship between gluten intolerance and depression (and bipolar, and anxiety disorder, as well as neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer's, dementia, etc., etc., etc.) that only years later I have come to understand, and to understand how the avoidance of gluten now helps me to cope so much better with the curve-balls that life inevitably throws our way.

Suicidal thoughts can often be as a result of chronic pain and chronic illness, including infertility, which can lead to anxiety and depression. Please know that your life matters, and that getting help matters, and changing your diet and helping yourself absolutely matters and could absolutely make a monumental difference.  We all have a story to tell and we all have a place in this world.  There might be someone right around that next corner who needs you in their life; possibly even to save it.  Please, save your own first.  Suicide prevention, compassion and empathy is so important.


RECLAIMYourFertility.com


Dr. Mercola on wheat: "Three Ounces of This a Day May be Harming Your Brain"