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.
When I first started writing the book, it included a lot of material from the earliest days of my mother’s life. Another large section explored her junior year abroad at the Sorbonne. In the end, however, I decided that the best initial focus to gain reader interest would be to start the story when she travels overseas in January 1944.
As the youngest of five children, and the youngest cousin on this side of the family, I felt like I had missed out on so much. My siblings and cousins were several years older than I was, and they seemed to be running off pursuing their lives, which, of course, was all good.
I think, at heart, I am a researcher. As a young girl, I had a lot of time on my hands, especially on rainy days and snow days. My siblings were away at school or college, and it was just my folks and me. In those quiet moments, I would scurry up the attic stairs and settle down with a box or two or three. I’d sift through letters, pictures and hanging clothes from bygone decades. Luckily, I recently found a piece I wrote years ago that was all about my childhood attic.
Over these past ten years, I undertook an extensive research effort to try and understand exactly what my mother did when she worked for OWI. Several trips to Washington, DC to go to the Library of Congress (LOC) and the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, two of the most amazing public institutions in this country, dazzled me.
At the LOC, my sister Tina and I listened to the broadcasts that were sent out via ABSIE, the American Broadcasting Station in Europe, the station my mother worked on during WWII when she was with the Office of War Information.
At the National Archives in nearby College Park, Maryland, imagine my delight when sorting through many of the OWI files, I found memos my mother had written in 1944 and 1945 and also memos that were directed to her. This was not what I had expected as my mother always downplayed her work for the OWI. To find tangible evidence of her participation in the war effort inspired me to get this story down on paper.
Luckily my husband frequently traveled to Europe on business, and I was able to tag along. Numerous trips to London and Paris expanded my take on my mother’s WWII experience.
The encouragement of my family, my writing teachers, fellow writers, friends, helped me get this story down on paper.
Trained as a journalist, I’m used to writing punchy, informative copy that doesn’t expound greatly beyond a few column inches. During my business career, letter writing did not lend itself to long-form narrative journalism either. Blogging I could do, but when it came time to start coalescing all this research I’d done, I had to learn a new style of writing as it went way beyond the blog format. It was a challenge I excitedly accepted.
I have loved every minute of the process including writing, researching, traveling, extracting information from my aunts, cousins and siblings. I am so happy to have seen this project through and the best part is that I can blog about it all now, too. Hooray!