Blame it on my father’s love for jazz or my random pulling of her book off of a middle school library shelf, but I grew to love the rhythm of words. So it makes sense that I pinched myself as I sat in the fourth row of the theater. My mind reeled. To look up and listen to a woman who children one hundred years from that moment would learn about was amazing. Maya Angelou was amazing. Phenomenal in fact. My literary hero.
I wrote my first book when I was five about a mother bear and her two cubs. At fourteen I tried my hand at an autobiography but in the age of dot matrix computer paper, I didn’t get far. Then came the teenage love songs, followed by college essays on Faulkner’s novels, and eventually an acceptance into the University of Pennsylvania to study folklore. My 25 page senior thesis at UVa compared the melodic and rhythmic components of various African American writers to the motifs and subsequent developmental movements found in orchestral pieces. I loved the marriage of music and 19-20th Century American literature. The flow and cadence of words. The refrains. “I have A Dream”, “Still I Rise”, “I too,…America”. Now as I try my hand at being a wordsmith with her own style, I’ll share the lessons that I’ve learned in life. Decades as a home school mom, a wife, a follower of Jesus; experiments of a developing writer of song and story will be displayed here in pictures and posts and prayers. At the end of every post, will be a question that you can ask yourself whether you are desiring encouragement or searching for a topic to reflect on. May this site be a “selah” moment for you.
Selah (Hebrew) – a pause
