Writers4Higher features Gayle Swedmark Hughes

 

 

The purpose of the Writers4Higher blog: to feature authors in a new light, a fresh look at the way writers use their talents and life energies to uplift humankind. Writers4Higher doesn’t promote religious or political views. Authors are asked to answer three simple questions: simple, yet complex.

 

 

This issue, Writers4Higher features

 

Gayle Swedmark Hughes

 

 

Hi Gayle. Welcome to the Writers4Higher family!

 

 

 

1. Tell me about yourself. Your book, your life, your inspiration.

 

As a product of small town life, I am a person who treasures long-term friendships and has a strong sense of place. Amelia Island, Florida and nearby Cumberland Island define me in many ways and find their way into my stories. I am a watercolorist who uses scenes from the water and land of my childhood. I write piano themes that are reflective of those moods as well.

 

I grew up as an adventurous little girl exploring every nook and cranny of my area. Later I left for college and law school and returned to North Florida after an important and broadening time of personal growth in New York City and Washington State. I became a pilot. I had an exciting career as a trial lawyer and draw on some of those experiences in my writing. Living quietly and simply on the Georgia side of Tallahassee, Florida, suits me perfectly.

 

My first book Two Thousand Daffodils is the story of surviving early trauma and thriving later in life, due in part to remarkable influences and events. A kindly black woman intervened in abuse and told me that I was "the Good Lord's happy child". She gave me a glass prism to remind me of that. It is by my bedside today. When I told my husband that I would marry him, he planted two thousand daffodils in my pasture. That is obviously the origin of my title. The central theme is overcoming fear. It is optimistic just like me. Some reviews have called it a love story not only to my husband but to my island.

2. Where do you see your writing taking you in the future?

 

Writing from today forward, I plan to explore the emotional growth of women and to chronicle their close relationships with men and other women. I want to use the vehicle of the novel to be more open and frank. It is important to me to understand and explain the process by which women become self sufficient and depend upon themselves for their own values and happiness.

3. How do you use your talents/time to help others?

 

Story-telling skills are honed by visiting Nursing Homes in the area to call upon older men and to argue about sports with them and to play cards with them. Hoping to comfort and entertain them I, instead, find myself being comforted and entertained. Some of my income is devoted to breast cancer research since I am a survivor. I also spend a portion of my time with college girls in making an attempt, sometimes futile, to help them see the long term consequences of their decisions and to help them make good choices. As President of Tallahassee Community College Foundation, I worked to raise money for the second chance institutions and to raise the standards of such colleges. Now I want to find more ways to help young authors and to encourage them to record their impressions of life. Helping others to be their best is the most satisfying work I have ever done.

 

Would you like to find Gayle?

Check out the links to this talented author:

 

 

 

 

 One Thousand Daffodils on Amazon

 

 

Wild Women Writers Publishing order page

 

 

Thanks again, Gayle!

Be sure to visit the Writers4Higher Market! We have gear for the writer in you.

The Writers4Higher Market

 

Rhett DeVane

Fiction with a Southern Twist

Writers4Higher blog

Rhett's Website

Rhett's funny Southern Blog

 

 

 

 

Happy Holidays from Writers4Higher!

 

Happy Holidays from Writers4Higher!

 

Whatever you celebrate...

 

The Writers4Higher family of authors

wishes you the very best.

 

We will return in January

with more fun posts from

our featured authors.

 

Till then...

 

Be safe, be happy, be merry.

 

Ho. Ho.

 

 

Rhett DeVane

www.rhettdevane.com



 

 



Writers4Higher features Darryl Bollinger

Welcome to Writers4Higher

 

 

The purpose of the Writers4Higher blog: to feature authors in a new light, a fresh look at the way writers use their talents and life energies to uplift humankind. Writers4Higher doesn’t promote religious or political views. Authors are asked to answer three simple questions: simple, yet complex.

 

 

This issue, Writers4Higher features

 

Darryl Bollinger

 

 

 

Hi, Darryl. Welcome to the Writers4Higher family!

 

 

1. Tell me about yourself. Your book(s), your life, your inspiration.

 

I’ve always loved to read. Growing up in a decidedly middle-class setting in Georgia, my idea of an exotic journey was a family car trip to visit relatives in Florida. For me, reading was an escape, a way to go places and do things that I never thought I’d get a chance to do.

 

I’ve been blessed, and have traveled the world and been able to do a lot of things that as a child I could only dream of doing. But I still remember the magic of being transported to other worlds by a good writer. And I’ve always wanted to be able to pass that along. I’ve always toyed with the idea of writing, in fact, started my first novel over twenty years ago. A couple of years ago, I finally finished it and it’s sitting on the shelf! I’ll revisit it at some point, but didn’t feel like it was ready for prime time.

 

I spent most of my work life in the health care industry. Health care is fascinating, representing the largest single portion of our GDP and touching everyone in one way or another. Yet, most people have no clue as to the inner workings. So I chose to present my stories with the health care industry as a backdrop, trying to give the reader a feel for what goes on behind the curtain.

 

I love fiction; it gives the writer the freedom that I enjoy. At the same time, I always felt like I learned something from the good fiction I read, so I’m a stickler for details on the components of my books. I do my homework and take the time to research things that I’m unfamiliar with. I want my readers to be able to take away something they didn’t know before they read my book, some new knowledge.

 

The Medicine Game, my first novel, is a story about greed and corruption in health care involving a corporate cover-up. In an effort to cut manufacturing costs of an expensive heart drug, the effectiveness has been compromised. Yet the profit motive drives the corporate players to hide the facts.

 

My newest book, A Case of Revenge, gives the reader a frightening glimpse of what is possible in a world where computers and technology reach into every corner of our lives. Coupled with the age-old motive of revenge, it makes for a suspenseful who-done-it.

 

2. Where do you see you writing taking you in the future?

 

I don’t claim to have any deep, moral messages in my books – they’re meant to be entertaining. Although I’d like to be able to make a living from my writing, my real reward is the feedback I get from readers. As a writer, I think that is the greatest satisfaction. My goal is to publish ten books in ten years.

 

3. How do you use your talents/time to help others?

 

Hopefully, my writing is encouraging others, both to read and write. I get lots of inquiries from aspiring writers, young and old, which I enjoy. I also enjoy interacting with my readers, especially in person. I’ve had the chance to speak to college English classes, and I love doing that. I find it energizing. I’d like to do more speaking on the subject of writing, and hope that in the future, I get more opportunities to do that.

I’m a member of the Florida Writers Association and actively involved with the Tallahassee Writers Association, and again, see that as a way to give back. I’ve always liked encouraging and motivating others.

 

Would you like to find Darryl?

Check out the links to this talented author:

 

 

Darryl's Website

The Medicine Game on Amazon

A Case of Revenge on Amazon

Darryl on Twitter

 

Thank you, Darryl!

 

Be sure to visit the Writers4Higher Market! We have gear for the writer in you.

The Writers4Higher Market

 

Rhett DeVane

Fiction with a Southern Twist

Writers4Higher blog

Rhett's Website

Rhett's funny Southern Blog

 

 

 

 

Writers4Higher features Stephen Wetta

Welcome to Writers4Higher

 

 

The purpose of the Writers4Higher blog: to feature authors in a new light, a fresh look at the way writers use their talents and life energies to uplift humankind. Writers4Higher doesn’t promote religious or political views. Authors are asked to answer three simple questions: simple, yet complex.

 

 

This issue, Writers4Higher features

 

Stephen Wetta

 

 

 

Hi, Stephen. Welcome to the Writers4Higher family!

1. Tell me about yourself. Your book(s), your life, your inspiration.

 

My life is the usual human mess, and I've made it worse by wanting to write books. I have no grand plan as a writer, I simply put things down as they come to me.

I grew up in Richmond without making any mark on the town, and I moved to NYC when I was in my thirties. I did in New York what most people do: worked and struggled and pretended to be involved in interesting things. I wrote a novel about 1950s rock and roll and tried to sell it and almost did. I got a Ph.D. and began to teach and somehow that became my career. To my surprise, Amy Einhorn agreed to publish another novel I wrote (called If Jack's in Love), which has sold modestly and gotten some good reviews. It won the 2011 Willie Mitchell Award for Southern Fiction.

2. Where do you see your writing taking you in the future?

I have several novels on my hard drive. One involves a hostage situation, a Louisiana hurricane, William Blake and Old Testament prophecy. My rockabilly novel still stands: I've rewritten it, and I hope that it (and my Louisiana hurricane novel) will some day see the light of day. At the moment I'm attempting a narrative set in Brooklyn, although I'm not sure I'm committed to it.

3. How do you use your talents/time to help others?

I can't say I see myself as being much of a help to anyone. With my 57-year-old back I can't even help others lift furniture. The best I can do now is serve as a cautionary tale for young people.

Would you like to find Stephen?

Check out the links to this talented author:

 

 

Stephen Wetta's Website

 

 

Stephen Wetta on Amazon.com

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks so much, Stephen! Look forward to more of your writing!

 

Be sure to visit the Writers4Higher Market! We have gear for the writer in you.

The Writers4Higher Market

 

Rhett DeVane

Fiction with a Southern Twist

Writers4Higher blog

Rhett's Website

Rhett's funny Southern Blog

 

 

 

 

A Thanksgiving Note from Writers4Higher

Welcome to Writers4Higher

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanksgiving...our time to stop for a few moments of peace.

 

Peace is a wonderful concept, but most creative ventures depend on the lack of peace. As writers, we need to remain unsettled, to question, to strive for answers.

 

 

Here's a little ditty I wrote at a recent writers' retreat, Fiction Among Friends.

 

Pearls arise from irritated oysters.

Writers depend on life to provide challenges;

 we look for the grains of sand

to burr beneath our spirits.

Remember the lesson.

Have gratitude for the sand.

And may you always stay irritated.

 

Rhett DeVane

Fiction Among Friends

November 2012

****** 

 

It's been an interesting few months on this blog. I've learned some amazing things about my writer friends. Boy, are they one talented and caring group of folks.

 

As a Southern woman, I was raised to be somewhat retiring...not that the training "took." Mama said, "while it is okay to toot your own horn, don't start up the whole band."

 

On this blog, I am happy to be the one prodding these authors to at least toot a few notes. We never know the golden qualities of those around us. At least, I have the opportunity to showcase those qualities on the Writers4Higher blog.

 

At this season of Thanksgiving, I urge all of you to pause and take the time to do something for someone else. Even a small stone skipped across a big pond can send ripples in every direction. You never know who you will touch.

 

My best to all of you! And may you stay irritated in a good way.

 

Rhett DeVane

Moderator, Writers4Higher

www.rhettdevane.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Writers4Higher features Pat MacEnulty

Welcome to Writers4Higher

 

 

The purpose of the Writers4Higher blog: to feature authors in a new light, a fresh look at the way writers use their talents and life energies to uplift humankind. Writers4Higher doesn’t promote religious or political views. Authors are asked to answer three simple questions: simple, yet complex.

 

 

This issue, Writers4Higher features

 

Pat MacEnulty

 

 

 

Hi, Pat. Welcome to the Writers4Higher family!

 

Tell me about yourself. Your book(s), your life, your inspiration.

 

I have six books published (four novels, a short story collection, and a memoir). My most recent book is Wait Until Tomorrow: A Daughter's Memoir, which I sometimes think of as a sequel to my first novel, Sweet Fire. I grew up and lived most of my life in Florida, but now I live and teach in Charlotte NC. I have a “checkered past” which, I think, means periods of dark and light, but which also winds up as material in my books. My mother was certainly an inspiration to me. In fact, my memoir is about her in the last years of her life. She died in 2011.

I guess my work always inspired by love in some way whether it’s love of place or love of a person or even of some particular time in my life. Many of my stories are set in Florida though I’m finally getting around to writing some things based in North Carolina where I live for the time being. If you were to look for a common theme in my works, you might say they are about redemption. Lord knows I’m counting on redemption in real life, too.

Barack Obama tells us that no one get there (wherever there is) alone. That’s true of writers as well. My literary mothers (Sheila Ortiz Taylor, Lynda Schor) and my literary fathers (Harry Crews and Les Standiford) exemplified a commitment to writing that keeps me going -- even during those periods when I wonder, who the hell is ever going to read this???

In addition to the six books, I have created a small publishing company and published two of my books ( a children’s book and a self-help book) and a wonderful book called Leah’s Journey Home by a 92-year-old man named Gil Ballance.

 

Where do you see your writing taking you in the future?

 

That’s the thing, isn’t it? The thing that every writer asks himself or herself every time a piece is put away -- poets, essayists, song writers, novelists. We all wonder: is there more? Do I have more to say? We always hope the answer is yes.

Right now, I am working on a book about Transformative Writing which is based on my blog: www.theartoftransformativewriting.com. The title changes every few weeks, but my goal is to have something in print by early next year at least for my workshops. Then I’ll see about sending it off.

I’m also working on a mystery novel. I love to write mysteries even though I’ve only finished one -- my third book, Time to Say Goodbye. My intention is to have a draft of this one finished by next summer.

How do you use your talents/time to help others?

 

Well, I give workshops in transformative writing. I think that’s the most important thing I can do because I really believe that writing not only transforms us, but it can transform the world. I think it’s spiritual work we do when we write. It’s connecting. It’s exploring the shadow. It’s creating art. I don’t mean to sound pompous. I just know that I’ve found treasures hidden in my own shabby life that I never would have known were there if I hadn’t picked up a pen and put some words on a piece of paper.

 

 

 

 

Would you like to find Pat?

 

Check out the links to this talented author:

 

Pat's blog

Pat MacEnulty's author page on Amazon.com

 

Wait Until Tomorrow on Amazon.com

 

Thanks so much for joining us, Pat!

 

Be sure to visit the Writers4Higher Market! We have gear for the writer in you.

The Writers4Higher Market

 

Rhett DeVane

Fiction with a Southern Twist

Writers4Higher blog

Rhett's Website

Rhett's funny Southern Blog

 

 

 

 

Writers4Higher features Marina Brown

Welcome to Writers4Higher

 

 

The purpose of the Writers4Higher blog: to feature authors in a new light, a fresh look at the way writers use their talents and life energies to uplift humankind. Writers4Higher doesn’t promote religious or political views. Authors are asked to answer three simple questions: simple, yet complex.

 

 

This issue, Writers4Higher features

 

Marina Brown

 

 

 

 

 

Hi, Marina. Welcome to the Writers4Higher family!

Tell me about yourself. Your book(s), your life, your inspiration.

 

To tell you about myself is to string together one seemingly less fortunate event to the very fortunate one that could only follow if the first one occurred.

I was born with ‘flat feet’. The doctor suggested dancing as a therapy. And thus I entered the world of ballet. Eventually, at 15, I would dance solo roles with Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and American Festival Ballet .

And then I had an injury. In my early twenties, while dancing, I broke my Achilles tendon. But a wonderful nurse somehow encouraged me, and I went to nursing school.  Having an RN enabled me to continue traveling and to live in NYC, LA, and Boston. It was in Los Angeles that I met my husband and moved to Florida.

We didn’t have children of our own, but adopted three wonderful ones.  And while home being a mother, I had the time to develop some other skills. I began to paint more and show my art work in juried shows, winning a number of Best of Shows and Honorable mentions for watercolors.  And I took up the cello, later playing for 14 years with the Tampa Bay Symphony. I hired a teacher and polished my French. Then started Italian. 

And then my marriage ended. But amazingly, in the orchestra I had joined, I met a violinist. He turned out to be an amazing man who owned wonderful boats, and soon, I too became a sailor.  It was on one of our trips sailing through the islands to Venezuela that we visited the island off the coast of Trinidad where my first novel takes place. I also began to write for the St. Petersburg Times and other newspapers, doing travel and features pieces; dance pieces for Dance Magazine; sailing articles for Sailing Magazine.

I now live in Tallahassee. I have discovered Argentine Tango and Flamenco dance. I play with the Big Bend Orchestra. My art is in the 1020 Gallery. I write for the Democrat on an ad hoc basis and for several magazines, including Florida Design, Tallahassee Magazine, Palm Beach Magazine.

So those are the facts. But the astounding thing about living them is that like Russian nesting dolls each must fit within the other…except that I sense I’ve done things from the inside out!

Land Without Mirrors is my first effort at writing a book. I had won awards for short stories, but the experience of living with characters for a long time was unique.  Each morning when I would sit down to write felt like opening a door on a room peopled by interesting folks who’d been "planning" things all night long. God knows what went on in that room…but as I began to type, the characters chatted and chastened and had their way.  I’m sorry to leave them for now.

Inspiration is…well, everywhere. It is in wonderful words that pout if not used. It is in the spotted red leaves I look out on as I write. It’s in music—the sound of words’ rhythms, the cadence of a man’s walk, the half-formed conversations I snap off and take with me as I walk through a train station. It is also in the people I’ve known, and lost, and forgotten, and wish I could resurrect.          

Where do you see your writing taking you in the future?

Impulsively, following a return from sailing in Greece, I submitted a long travel/feature article to the St. Petersburg Times. It was my first venture in writing for money…before that envelopes covered with poems, character studies, and short stories filled boxes and the corners of closets. But then the Times bought the article and asked for more.

Over the next years I wrote whenever I traveled--India, China, Turkey, Peru, St. Lucia, Columbia, and so on.  I wrote about my hospice patients. I did ballet and music reviews. And many, many feature stories for the paper. I wrote about Ballet Russe for Dance Magazine; about sailing the Med for Sailing Magazine; about perfume for Tampa Bay Illustrated; America’s Cup helmsmen; Greta VonSustren’s yacht; Tamara Mellon’s Jimmy Choo shoes, and Venus Williams’ design studio.  Always learning from truly wonderful editors, who molded and tightened my writing, each one became a loving and caring professor and hopefully….my writing improved.

Now I have written my first book, a novel that takes place off the coast of Trinidad, on the island of Chacachacare, a now abandoned leper island where from the late 1920s over 300 patients, their uninfected caregivers, and a convent of Dominican nursing sisters lived. Hansen’s disease was effectively cured in the 1980s and the Chacachacare colony’s patients dispersed back into society on medications that rendered their disease non-infective.  However, it was those living there for nearly 60 years that caused me to reimagine their lives.

Today, one can walk through the abandoned buildings…the convent, the church, the infirmary, and the tiny cottages of the patients. It’s as though these people had gotten up and left "yesterday." Though the jungle is now reclaiming many of the buildings, one can still pick up tubes of medicine, read the name cards with the treatment someone received, see the rusting iron beds lined up side by side. It was in the infirmary that I found scrawled on the wall in tiny, childish script, the words, “When I grow up I want to be a teacher.” It is to that child, and others like him, whose forlorn hopes were likely never fulfilled, that I dedicate Land Without Mirrors.

 

How do you use your talents/time to help others?

Like most of us, I serve on a variety of committees: the FSU Friends of Dance Board, chair of the Publicity Committee of the Big Bend Orchestra, among them. I do pro-bono writing for several other worthy organizations.

I hope I am a help to my three grown children with motherly advice and understanding.

I bake Christmas cookies for the homeless…

And hopefully, next year I will publish a book of Hospice stories that lets Death enter with beauty and not with fear.

Would you like to find Marina?

 

Check out the links to this talented author:

 

 

 

 

Land Without Mirrors on Amazon.com

 

 

Land Without Mirrors--Kindle edition on Amazon.com

 

 

Marina Brown's author page on Amazon.com

 

 

 

Thank you, Marina!

 

Be sure to visit the Writers4Higher Market! We have gear for the writer in you.

The Writers4Higher Market

 

Rhett DeVane

Fiction with a Southern Twist

Writers4Higher blog

Rhett's Website

Rhett's funny Southern Blog