A retirement dream job, a yearning to write; a bookstore and a well-known Canadian author, all entered my life with magical serendipity.
I was sixty-seven, with forty-three pages of a memoir awaiting page forty-four.
I Wanted to Hold Onto the Stories
I began a memoir seven months after my husband, Doug died.
I wanted to hold on to the stories that I believed were the essence of him. When I began to write I was in an unfamiliar world where everything had changed, and where writing his story mattered.
Throughout my life, in the many and varied capacities I’ve chosen—teacher, professor, teacher of teachers—writing was an integral part of my work. I wrote scholarly articles, a thesis. And occasionally I’d write a short story which I’d place in a drawer, never revealing to anyone that I yearned to write.
I Wrote for My Writing Group
Becoming a writer, one who needs to write, as I am now, was gradual and hesitant. A group of women, was the energy for revealing the yearning within, a revelation to which I hadn’t given breath or air.
We called ourselves The Reflective Café. I wrote for these women. Each month we met. Soon there were two groups, then three. Thus, I was moved to express our deeper sense of ourselves and our untold stories – for ten years we listened, talked and wrote.
Yet throughout that time I dared not call myself a writer and, never an author. But my yearning to tell my late husband’s tale prevailed and my yearning to write.
Self-Doubt Set In with a Crash
Forty-three pages later, I was stalled. Self-doubt set in with a crash; how could I possibly find a writer within myself who’d be faithful to and give words to this story? Whatever made me consider I might be a writer?
In the midst of doubt, and the misgivings, I discovered that writing does not need to be a lone endeavor, a realization that has brought me through the hills and valleys of my writing endeavors.
Fortuitous events leading to choices I’ve made have granted me a measure of tenacity, a characteristic essential to the emotional wellbeing of the writer.
Yes, You Are a Writer
During phases of my retirement I worked at a bookstore facilitating author brunches, introducing novelists, non-fiction writers and poets, a “dream job” for this aspiring writer.
Here I met a well-known Canadian author, Lawrence Hill, who, after I gathered the courage to approach him, agreed to read my stalled forty-three pages.
His first words when he called me, were, yes, you are a writer, this story is yours, write it from your world. I will be happy to work with you.
As I hung up the phone, his words reverberated, “you are a writer.”
In an email he wrote now is the time to push past your personal reticence and be bold.
Those are words I share with all beginning writers putting pen to the page and fingers to the keys, particularly those in later years of life.
Writing Becomes Alive and Whole in Relationship
As coach, editor, and teacher, Lawrence set me on a path from which I’ve not wavered. Here are the words I found to express what occurred when I knew I’d opened the door and become a writer. They are from the acknowledgements of Will You Be Sitting Beside Me, the memoir I wrote after Doug died.
Writing is not a solitary act. I may be the person sitting, watching sentences and paragraphs take on life across the computer screen, however the story which emerges is the child of many. We live and thrive in relationship and writing becomes alive and whole in relationship.
As I read those words now, I realize that my relationship with my deepest self sustained and nurtured my creative spirit; the serendipity of my work in the bookstore, meeting and working with Lawrence Hill, set the way forward.
I learned to watch and listen when those serendipitous moments arrived.
Writing My Memoir was the Beginning
Authors and writers have come into my life during the past fourteen years, people ready to encourage and urge me on.
When I attended a Creative Writers of Ireland workshop with Irene Graham on Innis Mor Ireland, I was finishing my memoir. I arrived there with the seed of a story growing into a novel.
I came to that island accompanied by some inner demons who wanted to thwart my growing creative spirit. Once again, I overrode the disparaging voices.
I took advantage of afternoons after class to walk the cliffs and narrow roads of the island. I sat on old Irish stone walls with my writing notebook and thought about my characters; I wondered who Casey MacMillan my main protagonist might be in my life, within this story now called Those We Left Behind.
When the workshop ended, Irene and I made a commitment, mine to begin writing this novel, and to carry on with Irene taking an online writing course. It was once again a discovery that writers create community. We may work in solitude; we are not solitary beings.
Each of My Stories Testified to the Truth for Me
Irene made a commitment to “stay at my shoulder” and ensure the negative voices wouldn’t win. Thus, we worked together over the next few years, emails, skypes, phone calls, she in a little village near Galway, me in my home near Toronto.
Those were the years I began and finished my first novel.
My second novel Out of Place I wrote and published with the editing, the creative guidance and ever-present encouragement of a Canadian author and poet Jaclyn Desforge, who like Lawrence Hill and Irene Graham arrived in my life unexpectedly.
Each of my stories whether memoir, or novel testified to the truth for me, that hearing and seeing the unfolding story through the eyes and ears of another, a personal writer-in -residence so to speak, enhanced the process, took me deeper into myself and intensified the narrative.
I Feared I Was a Pretender
One of the intense emotions I experienced early in my writing career, was a fear that I was a “pretender,” that I wasn’t a writer in the way well-read authors are.
Yet rather than give feet to that idea, I kept writing through the thought. I meditated, I walked, I trusted myself, I trusted my inner knowing.
When I finished Those We Left Behind and began the journey to publish, I entered the world of rejections, and paradoxically, I began to feel and see myself as “writer”; I didn’t consider the possibility of giving up.
While looking for a publisher, I met the author Kristina Bak at a poetry reading in Bend Oregon. As writers do, we shared our triumphs and our frustrations, and another serendipitous moment occurred, almost humorous.
We talked about being novice writers in our seventies. With that piece of data in mind, she smiled and suggested the self-publishing route and without talking a breath suggested a hybrid company with whom she’d published.
The rest now is history, I have published both novels, Those We Left behind and Out of Place with Luminare Press in Eugene Oregon. Overcoming my fear of approaching Patricia Marshall owner and editor of Luminare Press led me to a talented group of editors, copy editors and marketing people who led me through the self-publishing maze to come out the other side with two novels of which I’m proud to take into the world.
Never Let Go of The Thread
“Never let go of the thread” is a last line from William Stafford’s poem, The Way It Is.
This poem has been at my shoulder for years, and most particularly throughout my writing career.
The threads within the writing community have shepherded me and pushed me to go deeper, to tell the stories I hold and to give space and time to them.
Editors at Luminare Press, writing coaches across the years, a remarkable promotions consultant, Sue Campbell in Portland, Oregon and friends who write, sharing their journeys, all are part of a writing community the threads of which have led this eighty-one-year-old woman to say: “My name is Milree Latimer and I am an author.”
I have never let go of the thread.
* * *
Milree Latimer is a retired teacher/professor and expat Canadian living in Central Oregon with her husband Jerry and their three cats, Arthur, George, and Justice. She is the author of a memoir and two novels, Those We Left Behind and Out of Place. She is currently writing her next novel.
For more information on Milree and her work, please see her website, and connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.
Out of Place: It’s 1913. Martha McGrath is fifteen years old when she is sent from a Home for Orphan Girls in Dublin to stay with relatives she’s never met in Kingston Ontario.
While she’s welcomed with open arms by her cousin Anna, a kindred spirit, her Aunt Emily isn’t quite so kind. As Martha tries and fails to connect with her late mother’s sister, she uncovers a tragic family history.
The Great War provides a backdrop for this fractured family. Anna, a Canadian Nursing Sister, travels to France and England to care for wounded soldiers. Martha stays behind, leaving this family who have taken her in. She travels to a farm, where she discovers home and place for the first time, as a farmer, a mother and the wife of Charlie who goes to war and comes home broken. Even as they’re separated, Martha and Anna find that their lives are forever intertwined.
The story moves through time into the beginning of the Second World War, when Simon Lansky, a Jewish professor in Berlin contacts Anna’s father and asks for help to rescue his two daughters from the horrors of the Holocaust. Martha and Anna become the rescuers, bringing the girls to a new place, a new country, and cementing a bond among them. But will Simon survive the war and be reunited with his daughters? Does war become a living place throughout the lives of Martha and Anna that defines where they belong? Where is home and place when nothing is certain?
Available on Amazon.
Those We Left Behind: Dr. Casey MacMillan teaches about love and loss yet has carefully constructed her life to distance herself from pain. Her world unravels when a woman from her past enters into a love affair with Galean, her close friend.
Fearing both the consequences of this new relationship and the sting of her unrequited feelings for Galean, she flees to Ireland. There, far from all that is familiar, she begins a search for clarity and discovers that she must revisit everything she believes in life to finally arrive at the truth.
Renewed, she emerges from her exile, but an unexpected turn of events leads her to consider a bold move, a risk that will change the course of her life. Casey must face her deepest fears and decide if she is ready to love and be loved- not just on the page, but in real life.
Available on Amazon.