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Learning To Swim Without Lane Lines Regrets, I've had a few |
 Photo courtesy of the author. |
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Learning To Swim Without Lane Lines Regrets, I've had a few |
Photo courtesy of the author. |
From my
earliest days, I’ve been a prodigious reader and hence have
informally learned how to write to capture the reader’s
attention (I hope). I’ve also been interested in – and
very much enjoyed – teaching since I was first asked to teach
swimming lessons at the pool where my siblings and I spent most of
our childhood summers. After I finished my bachelor’s and
master’s degrees, both in Education, I became a preschool
teacher and administrator before returning to college to earn a
doctorate focused on why teachers in various settings teach as they
do. I then spent 30 years in post-secondary education where I had the
opportunity – and the obligation – to write and publish
so that I could gain tenure and be promoted.
I also
took writing classes on and off for years. Now, I’m using my
retirement, in part, to move past academic writing to both fiction
and non-fiction writing. I’ve been working on a memoir, for
example, hoping it will soon be the right time to find an agent and
see if I can get the book published, and three short pieces of mine
are under review for a literary publication from our local library.
I have
28 refereed academic publications (several co-authored), one
co-edited book, six book chapters, and numerous book and article
reviews, as well as a few other publications to my name.
While
I’ve submitted non-academic work occasionally and have had
several pieces published online and one poem published in a college
collection, I haven’t been as “successful” as I had
hoped to be. This is now my focus; the story above is the prologue
for the memoir I have been working on for years and which is
(finally!) almost finished.