About Me

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Widows' Voice

A  lone house sites on a hill, some spare shrubs surround it. There’s a  white picket fence, cached with dust but still well mended. Its posts  echo the hills rolling beneath. Everything is gentle and nothing seems  hard. Why there’s a two-story tower in the middle of the plain...wait,  maybe it’s not the middle. From where you are, the plain totally  surrounds you. It looks like you could walk miles in either direction  and still be nowhere nears its edges. The middle then must be somewhere,  but you can’t be sure it’s where you are and where this building is.  The building appears to have just the one door and two windows and no  apparent purpose. Maybe if there were a horse tied up out back, or at  least some semblance of people having been here. To find out, you might  just have to go in and see for yourself.

Between 2011-2014, I published five short stories and finished a novel called, Shelter Me, which is published by Ink and Quill Publication (Henderson, NV) and available from Amazon.com and BN.com. Shelter Me is the story of two women in crisis: a recently widowed, executive's wife who must get her first job at age 55 with no jobs skills, and the young, battered wife and mother who becomes the widow's work supervisor. Having worked in the department of psychiatry for a community hospital, I witnessed the horror and cruelty perpetrated on battered women and children by their domestic partners -- who supposedly loved them.  Writing Shelter Me was my way of exorcising those demons and potentially reaching victims of domestic violence to help them find a way out. When I became a widow, I wondered why the two polarities of love (a good love lost and a bad love-trap) could not empower and enact recovery for the other, and although these women's stories are vastly different, the feelings of loss and grief are not.  Please join me as I explore these twin traumas and present options to those dealing with their aftermath.