The most difficult story I have ever written was the story of a life, my husband’s life. I wrote his obituary after he died on Sept. 14, 2010.
I loved and respected Ed Godleski. He was my soulmate, so it was easy to come up with the words, the thoughts, the language of praise. The writing was not the difficult part.
What stung was the reality of seeing the item in print two days later. It was shocking, horrifying. Reading it, I had the first inkling that Ed might really be gone.
I clipped Ed’s obituary out of the Daily Hampshire Gazette, but I didn’t put it in my clips file. I laminated it and still use it as my bookmark.
Days after it appeared, I decided that it was time to tell my story, and I started writing, in my bed, the only place I felt alive.
I have been telling the stories of others for almost 30 years. I needed to tell mine in a way that was physical. I started a book, which I hate to call a memoir because that seems too trendy, but indeed it is a personal story of love and loss. It’s a story about the pull of God and spirituality and faith that sees one through.
Soon, I will send a book proposal to an agent in New York City and hope he likes my ideas, my writing style, my story, or, really, our story, Ed’s and mine.
I’m calling the book, “More Every Day,” now. I hope you will one day get to read it.
I started writing when I was a little girl growing up in the 60s and 70s, not many years after I learned how to form words and sentences.
Back then, I wrote letters.
My parents owned a summer house in New Hampshire on Lake Winnisquam, and I spent the summer there. I wrote letters to my friends back in Walpole and to my father, who spent the week at home and came to us on the weekends.
I knew how to drive a boat, and every day, my friend Sarah and I drove in my aluminum boat with its Evinrude motor to the post office several miles to the north. I had to send those letters.
I guess even back then, I had to tell my story, and that’s why I wrote in journals and in diaries in the years that followed.
Officially, I began to write about other people in high school. I wrote for the student newspaper, led by a journalism teacher who was kind and inspiring. In college, I wrote for the Westfield State Owl at Westfield State University, and I was its editor in my senior year, 1985.
I had a job as a journalist before I graduated, at what was then the Springfield Morning-Union, now the Springfield Republican. Later, I worked full time at the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Mass., and am proud to say I still write on a freelance basis for that quality smalltown paper.
Please take some time to read my biography on this site and to email me suggestions on what you’d like to see in this blog.
Would you like to read excerpts from the book?
Would you like some writing exercises?
Would you like to see the stories that my senior citizens write in a class that I teach?
Let’s keep each other informed.
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