​A BENCHMARK MOMENT IN MY LIFE

On August 6 of this year I turned in my manuscript for my memoir to my publisher West Margin Press. RAISED IN RUINS is about growing up in the ruins of a cannery in the Alaskan wilderness with only my family.

It took me just over a year to write it. I'm not somebody who dwells on the past a lot, so it was a struggle, but also an adventure, to constantly delve into things I'd experienced that I hadn't thought about in years.

I found that just the process of writing memories down made more memories surface. And when I re-wrote them, additional details I'd forgotten jumped to the surface. To help me remember, I had written a lot of journals when I was a kid, we'd audio recorded conversations, and my entire family generously shared their point of view of what had happened. Of course I had to write it the way I experienced it, but they helped me remember a lot that I'd forgotten, making it a fuller, deeper story.

And in the process of writing the memoir I came to realize in a way I never had before what an amazing experience we had. We lived so remotely that it gave me a different perspective on space and especially time than I would have had growing up in the world.

We learned many lessons children aren't usually taught, including the basic one of how to survive, which I wrote about in a guest blog for a wonderful woman and inspirational blogger who in one brief experience of Alaska understood it immediately and deeply. Her name is Carla Kirkland and you can find my guest blog at:

https://carlakirklandwriter.com/2019/08/24/how-to-survive/

Due to ongoing signal problems my blogs will have to be shorter than usual with less photos, but if this works I'm hoping I can post them more regularly in the future.

I can't wait to see what happens with RAISED IN RUINS and how readers will respond to it when it comes out next year.