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Sunday Series: Julia Gimbel on Why I Write

In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Julia Gimbel, who writes about the desire to write and, more importantly, the need.

*Image of sepia photo and army effects by jesse orrico on Unsplash

For me, it has rarely been about wanting to write, it’s been about having to write. Let me explain.
 
Over thirty years ago, I left college a freshly minted journalist with spiral bound notebook in hand, ready to take on the questions of who, what, where, when, and why. Through most of my professional career, the writing assigned to me was institutional, a “stick to the facts, ma’am” kind of affair. I wrote fashion copy for a local magazine, employee manuals and customer newsletters for a retailer, and merchandising instructions for a manufacturer. While these writing experiences were not always the most creative, they were satisfying because in their simplicity, these missives fulfilled people’s needs.
 
Fast forward to five years ago when I discovered a 60-page handwritten WWII journal my late father tucked away in the back of a family scrapbook. As I transcribed the journal for my siblings, I found myself immersed in his memories and curious to learn more about that era in American history. The more I learned, the more I felt I had to write – it was almost as if Dad was compelling me to flesh out the skeleton of his journal by researching and then sharing what I unearthed with others.

This time there was an emotional connection that motivated me to continue writing, until over the course of several years I ended up with enough chapters for a book. In early March, Orange Hat Publishing released my book, Student, Sailor, Skipper, Survivor – How WWII Transformed the Lives of Ordinary Americans. 

It turns out that I am not the only person of a certain age who is interested in WWII history. While writing the book, I constantly discovered interesting stories that didn’t tie into my manuscript but that I felt I still had to write about. They found a home on my author facebook page, @JuliaWritesWWII, which almost 13,000 people follow to see the tidbits of history I share.

I have to write to fuel my curiosity about the past and to share with others. The funniest part of it all? I’ve come full circle, recently enrolling in a Masters of World War II program where I now have to write term papers!

JULIA GIMBEL lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with her husband, Josh, and their two pugs, who snore peacefully at her feet as she writes. She is proud of her two adult children, Elijah and Lena, who are establishing themselves respectively at work and school. She has been published in Family Stories from the Attic (Hidden Timber Books, 2017), Creative Wisconsin Literary Journal (2017 & 2019), and Wisconsin People & Ideas (2019). Julia shares little-known WWII stories with thousands of followers on her facebook page, @JuliaWritesWWII. She is currently pursuing her Masters degree in World War II Studies.

GIVEAWAY: Enter HERE by Saturday, March 28th, for a chance to win
a copy of Student, Sailor, Skipper, Survivor, courtesy of Julia Gimbel!

You can purchase a copy through Orange Hat Publishing, Amazon,
Barnes and Noble, or BOOKSHOP.org.

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Sunday Series: Kathy Collins on Why I Write

For the next several Sundays, I’d like to introduce you to writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, meet Kathy Collins, an amazing flash nonfiction writer from the west coast. (This is her second publication!)

Where there is smoke there is fire. As a kid, I devoured my brother’s Cub Scout magazine, Boys’ Life.  The mystery of flashing a fire with a spark from two sticks. It was beyond my ten-year-old ability to understand. It was magical.

I read everything. My if I had gone missing would have included these details: freckled nose lost in a book, spare book grasped in other hand. I diligently listed every book I read on lined notebook paper. My young life was enhanced by wrinkles in time, a little Prince and that silly old bear. With my ten-year old tears, I watered where the red fern grew. I lived in the little house on the prairie and captured the castle. I went through the door in the wall and into the secret garden. One summer I solved 56 mysteries with Nancy.

My brother could build his little boy world out of Lincoln Logs. He would dump them out of the cylinder container. The two-inch wooden logs would notch together at right angles to create little buildings. Hours and hours later a compound of green roofed forts popped up on the beige carpet prairie. I was excluded from the world he built. Construction of my world happened in my brain and was cobbled sentence by sentence, page by page, chapter by chapter. Construction lights flashed Morse coded stories again and again waiting for release. I journaled the angst of being a brunette with braces in a blonde Wisconsin world. I wrote a story for my ninth grade English class. It was a glorious middle age love story. In my mind middle age was 40. I knew nothing of love. My characters had a housekeeper and a Picasso. I have no memory of how this story was conceived. The rural High School English teacher gave me public recognition.

I didn’t write again until college. I wrote a story about the end of my first romance. Well received by my teacher. The next year I took a creative writing class. The professor disclosed that A’s were not part of his grading arsenal. I have no recollection of what I wrote but still cherish the A+ grade.

The life that followed college was stressful. In retrospect unauthentic. I wrote the things that needed to be written. The rhythms of life. Love notes, Thank You notes and obituaries. Weekly letters home in a pre-email world. I ghost wrote speeches and letters and resumes. I wrote dating profiles for friends seeking soulmates. Memos, Regulatory filings, and employee reviews at work. I wrote my own divorce.

An old friend sent me a packet of poems. They were written by me during my second serious romance. I had no memory, but it flashed a flicker and I wrote a poem about surviving breast cancer. I submitted it to poetry contest for survivors. I won and my poem was published. My heartbeat accelerated fueled by the music of joy.

Two years ago, 1,788.9 miles from home on Halloween Eve a seemingly random encounter altered my life. I could have turned left but I went right. I opened a door and entered a book sale. I stopped at Christi’s table and we chatted about books and writing. She gave me a packet of writing prompts. Something flared within me – soul kindling that sparked a dormant fire. I signed up for a class and kept signing up, as the fire illuminated the stories patiently waiting a very long time to be told. I wrote of joy and despair floating on a sea of resilience. My heart’s inhabitants. Birth and death. Surviving and letting go.

It turns out I always was a writer. I just forgot.

Kathy Collins lives in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her neighborhood sits on the cusp of the desert nestled in a ring of mountains. This beauty is the price she pays for extreme summer heat. She started writing three years ago after escaping from three plus decades of a telecommunications career. She has lots of stories to unravel. She is married, a mother of one, and Nana to two. Her favorite memories are woven from travel and a life filled with love and laughter.

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Guest Post: Marjorie Pagel on Poetry & Writing

Pagel's newest collection, Where I'm From (cover image): painting of red barn

In Milwaukee writing circles, Marjorie Pagel needs no introduction. She is a powerhouse with the pen (I’ve seen her in action), diving into writing with little hesitation, bringing amazing insight to the page, and then publishing great poems and stories.

Today she guest posts, sharing about her long relationship with writing while introducing us to one of her poems, “The Corn Crop” (one of my favorites). You’ll find an immediate connection in all she writes, so enter the giveaway to win a copy of her latest publication, Where I’m From: Poems and Stories. Deadline to enter is Sunday, May 19th, at noon. Now, welcome Marjorie!

Let’s Write!

Marjorie Pagel, standing next to a tree with fall colors in background.

My first poem was inspired by the sight of a robin while swinging outside our family’s farmhouse the spring of 1950. I was nine years old. In the next two years I had composed enough original poetry for my first book.

I used my best cursive handwriting on the lined 4×7-inch tablet, decorated the cover with a construction paper design, and dedicated it to my grandmother, Mary Johnson, who lived in Minnesota. I still feel a bit guilty that I never made a similar gift to my other grandmother, Ella Ellingson, in Milwaukee. I actually loved her best.

Since I’m talking about “one” writer’s beginnings (the other, more famous one, was Eudora Welty) I may as well mention the two books of original writing that won blue ribbons at the Marquette County Fair when I was in seventh and eighth grade. They both bore the title, “Let’s Write,” in recognition of the radio program that inspired them. Everyone in our one-room country school would sit quietly at our desks to listen to this broadcast from Wisconsin School of the Air. When the radio was turned off we would write – a little essay, a story, a poem. For the county fair I neatly copied each week’s assignment from the school year into a 9×12 notebook.

Here’s what I find interesting. Some years back when I was writing a blog for Community Newspapers, I wrote about my “Let’s Write” classroom experience, which became part of a Wisconsin history project for a girl at Nicolet High School. The two of us are still Facebook friends.

Flash forward to 2016. I was 75 years old with hundreds of accumulated essays, poems, and stories – most of them sitting unpublished on my computer. Okay, I said to myself, It’s harvest time. Just as my father had harvested his crops each fall, I would harvest some of my best writing in the autumn of my life. It would be a gift to pass along to family and friends. My first book, The Romance of Anna Smith and Other Stories, was published in 2017 with the help of David Gawlik, Caritas Publishing, before my 76th birthday.

Marjorie Pagel holding copies of her first book. The Romance of Anna Smith and Other Stories

“When are you going to publish your next book?” people asked me, so early this year, at age 77, I published Where I’m From: poems and stories.

Meanwhile, I keep writing. I’m a regular participant in the roundtables at Red Oak Writing in West Allis, Wisconsin. I’ve been gaining inspiration and craftsmanship from Wisconsin’s poet laureate, Margaret Rozga, at the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha, and I’m learning new skills in flash nonfiction with Christi Craig. It’s an online class, which means that writers from everywhere are connected. It reminds me of those grade school days when the voice of Marie Applegate in Madison, Wisconsin, reached the listening ears of kids like me in classrooms all across the state.

The message remains the same: “Let’s Write!”

The Corn Crop

That first spring, when my father was just a weekend farmer,
he drove out into the sandbur fields to plant corn.
He rode like a conqueror on the seat of his new Farmall tractor.
It was shiny red, like the little coaster wagon I admired
in the Gambles store window.

When all the corn did not come up, my brother and I marched along
with our buckets of seed corn. We placed three yellow kernels
in each scooped-out hollow and covered them over with smooth dirt.
My father figured one out of three ought to grow
but sometimes all three did, and so we’d trudge along again
thinning out the corn.

One year, the year it hailed, we had a good crop, growing way higher
than even my father’s knees by the Fourth of July.
Someone said it was the best crop of corn in Marquette County.
My father never said that, of course, for he was not given to bragging.
Still he had a fierce proud look on his face and his eyes were happy.

When the hail came that summer
he was away in the city working his factory job.
My mother collected a cupful of the ice marbles
and put them in the freezer box of our little Frigidaire.
That Friday night when my father came home on the train
she showed him the hailstones, her offering of proof
that the hail had really happened, that the corn now lay in shreds
and there was nothing she could have done to save it.

ABOUT the AUTHOR

Marjorie Pagel grew up in rural Wisconsin where she attended a one-room country school and graduated with a high school class of just fifty students. She moved to Milwaukee for college, earning both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UWM. Meanwhile, she was married, had a family, and worked as a reporter/feature writer for a local suburban newspaper. She is the author of two books and five one-act plays, which have been produced by Village Playhouse in West Allis, Wisconsin.

She continues to participate in writing workshops and is affiliated with local and state writing groups. Writing is part of her daily routine. “It keeps me grounded,” she says. “I want to always remember where I’m from while paying close attention to who I am today – this moment – and my connections to all the people who continue to enrich my life. Although many of the people who have shaped my life are gone now, I celebrate their continuing presence through the gift of memory, and I savor the daily adventure that even an ordinary life has to offer.”

DON’T FORGET! Enter the giveaway by Sunday, May 19th, for a chance to win a copy of her newest book, Where I’m From: Poems and Stories!