From My Mother’s OWI Garret

In the house I grew up in, our attic was stacked with boxes. A decade could be retraced in an hour’s time.  Births, deaths, baptisms, confirmations and graduations and various ephemera littered the rafters. Frayed boxes bulged with old photographs and letters.

ACJ Letters home during WWI – Source: Family Photos

I was the youngest of my family and almost the youngest of my entire extended family. So much had transpired before I had attained an awareness of what was going on. In the attic, I was able to look back and recapture some sense of my family’s life before I came along. I found it captivating to think about where they had lived and to read about the details of their lives. And rich material there was. Continue reading “From My Mother’s OWI Garret”

It’s a Writing Life is Officially Launched!

I am so excited to relaunch my blog, It’s a Writing Life!

I originally started this blog nearly ten years ago when I embarked on a journey to better understand my family’s history. I’d vaguely thought about writing a book but I needed time to organize my thoughts and purpose.

Since then, I’ve realized that I wanted to use this platform not only as a vehicle about my hopefully-to-be-published book, The French Desk, but other topics as well that are important to me.  These include travel, family life, history, ancestry, and broader human interest stories.

Other than the family history initiative, the project that has been my main focus these past years has been to retrace the story of my mother’s wartime adventure with the Office of War Information (OWI) – in New York, London and Paris, during 1942-1945.

Continue reading “It’s a Writing Life is Officially Launched!”