Welcome to my website, where I share a selection of my writing. I am a published author with pieces appearing in the California Writers Club’s Literary Review, and the anthologies Nothing But The Truth So Help Me God—51 Women Reveal the Power of Positive Female Connection, and Chicken Soup for the Soul—The Joy of Adoption, and poetry at Telepoem Booth®Iowa. At one time I was a columnist and editor for Maui Vision Magazine, and my essays and articles have appeared in various publications around the San Francisco Bay Area. Additionally, I am the founder of the Ames Writers Collective based in Ames, Iowa, and I serve on the Willa Cather Foundation Board of Governors, and have served as a board of director for Litquake in San Francisco
In 2021, I graduated with my MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from my alma mater Iowa State University. Currently, I am editing my draft memoir thesis, Redacted–A Memoir of Adoption, and plan to seek representation in 2023.
While I studied for my MFA at Iowa State University, I came to recognize that writers in Central Iowa desired options to gather with other writers and to study writing outside of academia. I created the Ames Writers Collective to make writing accessible. For more information about the Ames Writers Collective, visit us here.
Typically when someone asks a writer, “when did you start writing,” the writer will generally say they’ve always written. That’s my story. My earliest writing began by writing thank you notes from the time I could write, to later corresponding with my next-door neighbor, Lisa when my parents moved my brother and I from Los Angeles, California to Stuttgart, Germany in 1973. Lisa and I wrote to each other for 20 years before we were reunited as adults. In high school, I wrote soul-searching stories in my English classes, and became an editor for The Opinion, the Peoria High School newspaper.
At Iowa State University, I left my writing behind to study fashion merchandising and had an interesting career as a retail buyer, director of events and conference planning for a graduate school of business, a director of executive education at a law school, and director of marketing for a hospice. While I wrote for all my jobs, and consistently journaled throughout my life, it was uncanny twists and turns that led me to my birthmother that inspired me to become a writer. For twenty years I’ve been penning my memoir, and it is nearing completion as I approach my last semester in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University.
Books that have informed and inspired my writing are: Slow Motion, Devotion, Still Writing, Hourglass, and Inheritance by Dani Shapiro; Heating and Cooling 52 Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly; Let’s Take the Long Walk Home: A Memoir of Friendship by Gail Caldwell; The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere by Debra Marquart; and When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams.
An avid photo essayist, I love snapping photos with my iPhone—especially building murals, landscapes, and prairie fauna. A selection of my Instagram posts are featured in my photo gallery.
I hope you enjoy perusing my website. Please consider signing up for my eNewsletters, which won’t inundate your email inbox.
Photo credits this page and my home page: Linda Rathje, Dramatic Memories
