Rekindling the Dream I Left Behind

It's My Turn!

From the time I read a chapter book, I wanted to be a writer. I imagined my readers escaping into an exciting world I created and forgetting where they were for hours. From an early age, I rolled LIFE magazines into pretend microphones shoving them into my family’s faces during gatherings to “interview” them for stories written on notebook paper. My family encouraged me with birthday gifts of junior typewriters and books, lots of books.

Over the years, my desire to become a writer never fully extinguished. In my teens, I refocused my aspirations from novelist to becoming an investigative reporter. After earning a degree in Journalism, I worked in news at a small-town radio station before becoming an editorial assistant for a medical publishing company in Chicago’s Loop, Year Book Medical Publishers, with hits like the 1978 Year Book of Urology.

I landed a dream job with a company car (an 8-cylinder beige 1978 Caprice Classic with a brown plaid cloth interior) and summers off with pay for Allyn & Bacon Publishers. My mission was to influence professors on book committees to adopt our textbooks and work with the college bookstores for ordering and sales. I also partnered with our acquisition editors to identify professors to write our next best-seller. Don’t hate me if you had to study Morrison and Boyd’s Organic Chemistry in college!

Adulthood was punctuated with career travel in medical equipment sales with a book packed and ready to read in my carry-on bag. There was no time to write for leisure. Two marriages resulted in divorce. Life as a single mom to a two-year-old son evolved my reading to the Berenstain Bears series until he could read himself. My writing was barely an ember for decades.

In the mid-2000s a friend started a local magazine, Indy Boomer, focused on Central Indiana’s 50+ readers. She invited me to write a monthly column, Boomers at Work. I jumped at the chance. It resulted in local notoriety with local radio interviews and speaking engagements. I began a blog of the Indy Boomer articles to widen my influence. For nearly a decade, while working, I wrote on weekends while watching my son’s wrestling matches and travel rugby meets. The fire to write was reignited.

During the COVID pandemic, while working remotely, I gifted myself an online writing course through the Lafayette (IN) Writers’ Studio, for my 63^rd birthday. We wrote, we read, and we encouraged each other via the Zoom screen. We bonded virtually. In Spring 2021, many of us met in person for the first time. I discovered my writing community, a writing family.

Although I had journalistic skills, I began to learn Creative Nonfiction and add literary writing techniques to my reporting and research experience. I was fully immersed. My planned retirement at 66 and 6 months to receive full Social Security benefits was approaching. Writing, the dream I had as a child, was rekindling with a sense of urgency at the same time.

Card by Susan Davis on IG: @IndySuz

I believe it is never too late to pursue your passion. My friend from our corporate days,

Diamond-Michael Scott

, introduced me to Substack when he relocated Great Books + Great Minds here a few years ago. After 46 years in Corporate America, I am on fire writing again, and I’m just getting started.

Writing is a calling, not a choice—

Isabel Allende