The Teacher Who Ate Her Pet
Author Biographies
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I grew up in Unionville, Michigan, graduated from Michigan State University, and taught elementary school in Iowa, Unionville, and then for thirty years in Okemos, MI. After my first retirement I worked with elementary intern teachers at Michigan State University for ten years.
Having time to devote to writing is a treasure. I listened to my father, mother, and her sisters, tell stories for so many years, awed by their talents to paint pictures with words. With my new found time I have begun to write and record my stories for family and others. Many times I've struggled through situations and muttered, "Someday it will make a good story." Someday has arrived.
Since my second retirement I spend my time pursuing whatever I choose to do. Much of it is shared with my supportive husband, John, our seven children, thirteen grandchildren and one great grandchild.
Curiosity, love of learning, giving, receiving and nurturing have been a part of the tapestry of my life. For me, each day is a gift! The next person or experience may be the most exciting yet.
My childhood took place in the farmlands of Indiana, and Indianapolis the capitol. After age ten we moved to Michigan. My formal education was in Cheboygan Schools, Central Michigan University and Michigan State University. Over the years my political concerns have evolved from very conservative to moderate. My curiosity about people and their stories encouraged me to see other cultures and to study their history. Travel in the world is my avocation. Reading, dramas, music and storytelling have enlarged my life by vicarious experiences.
Community involvement in numerous organizations, at all levels, has given me an opportunity to serve and learn. I have spent seventy years as a student, thirty years as a teacher and fifty years as a wife. We've parented seven fantastic children through adulthood and they have presented us with fifteen wonderful grandchildren. We have hosted exchange students from nine countries. These experiences have added support and nurturing to me as a person.
When I asked a friend to define me in five words, they were: curious, energetic, organized, flexible and tenacious to the end. I am eternally a student with a thirst for knowledge.
I am a retired educator and lifelong writer. I attribute my love of storytelling to my witty, articulate father and the dynamic Southern Baptist evangelists who preached at my church when I was a child. They were my role models. They made me laugh, made me cry, made me seek salvation on my knees. I live in Mason, Michigan with my dog, Bugsy Malone, and three cats: Figgy, Ollie, and Razzle-Taz.
Forty-four years ago, I was uprooted from a comfortable (some might say privileged) existence in Cuba to an orphanage in Philadelphia. I ended as a Cuban refugee in Miami Beach. After high school, I enrolled in Miami Dade Community College because I failed to get a secretarial job. I went on to earn a Bachelor's of Art degree in sociology at Florida Atlantic University and a Master's degree in social work at Florida State University. I've been a medical social worker for most of my professional career. I'm currently a manager in the patient support services department at Sparrow Hospital in Lansing, Michigan.
Four years ago, I started writing as a hobby. I write personal vignettes, usually infused with humor. Publishing my work was never a goal, but I can't deny my excitement at the opportunity to self-publish this story. This experience forced me to look at my writing more critically. With one story in print, I hope to publish more in the future.
I grew up in Ponce, a city located in the southern part of Puerto Rico, a beautiful island in the Caribbean. The sixth of seven children, raised with Catholic values, I loved nature and have always enjoyed its simple presents.
I earned a Masters degree in health services administration in 1990. In 1992 I married Carlos. I worked as a hospital administrator for fourteen years in Puerto Rico before moving to Michigan in 2004. Now I am a full-time mother enjoying our two most-valuable treasures, Carlitos and Carelis. In the fall of 2005, I began my doctoral degree in kinesiology at Michigan State University.
I fell in love with the beauty of writing and reading when I was a child. The intense experiences of my life have been the motivation for writing my memoirs. Missing Puerto Rico and enjoying the blessings of living in Michigan give me other good reasons to write my memoirs.
Writing my memoirs has shown me how I have lived through different experiences in my life, while still being the same human being. Our bodies can change, our minds can mature, but our souls are the same as when we were children.
I was born and raised in Superior, Wisconsin as a Wisconsin dairy farmer's daughter. I currently live in Lansing, Michigan. I'm a Michigan state police security officer assigned to the governor's security unit. I also work for the Dewitt Township fire department as a firefighter and emergency medical technician. I'm a first aid instructor for the Michigan state police and I teach first aid classes at the American Red Cross.
My son, Jeff, and his wife, Nikki, who live in Mulliken, Michigan are expecting their first child in October. It's a girl! I have two step-children and three step-grandchildren, all of whom live in Michigan.
I enjoy drawing and painting and I decorate my home and yard with my own original creations. Going to the extreme at Halloween, I scare the treat-or-treaters away.
I especially love loading my big, hairy dog, Wooly Bully Bear, in my vehicle, and driving to Wisconsin to spend vacation time with my family. I guess it's true -- you can take the girl out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the girl.
Although I spent two years in Seoul, Korea during grammar school, I grew up in Eugene, Oregon at the southern end of the Willamette Valley. I moved to the Great Lakes bioregion in 1979 where I earned a Bachelors Degree in criminal justice and a Master of Divinity degree. I coordinate the social justice, peace and ecological sustainability work of the IHM Sisters in Monroe, Michigan. I've taught the "Life Stories: Writing Your Memoirs" class through community education for ten years.
Stories have been the most effective way for me to understand people whose experiences are different from mine. I've written my memoirs to share my life, help people I know to understand my perspective, get a new view of my experiences through the process of writing, and situate myself in the human story and within the larger cosmic story.
The strongest influence on my writing has been my mother, who instilled in me a love for language that she retains herself even now as she copes with memory loss at age eighty-six. I have long-admired the work of Joan Didion, who wrote, "We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget . . . forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were."
Through Talk Pretty Press, I published, "Something that Happened at Night: Writing Exercises to Begin Your Memoirs or End Writers Block," based on the writing exercises I developed for the Life Stories class.
I grew up in the small town of Galesburg, Michigan (population 1200), about nine miles from Kalamazoo. My family were pioneers of Kalamazoo County. We have nine land grant deeds from the government. While in high school I won the Kalamazoo Country Woman's Singles Tennis Championship three times. Besides playing in the school band I played with the first jazz band. I graduated in 1939.
Today I am still playing tennis and have completed twenty-seven years in the "Second Time Around Ladies Band" in Lansing, Michigan. In 1986, we performed on The Today Show with Willard Scott. On April 30, 2004, we were invited to play when the last Oldsmobile rolled off the assembly line! I play tenor sax, soprano sax, clarinet, and the "bones"--the oldest known instrument. The first bones came from the ribs of animals!
I graduated from Sparrow Hospital School of Nursing in Lansing, Michigan in 1943. While in training, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. After graduation I served in the Navy Nurse Corps from 1944-1946, at Philadelphia Naval Hospital and Parris Island Naval Hospital, a Marine Corps Base. After World War II, I was a visiting nurse in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. I served on the Sparrow Hospital Women's Board of Managers for over twenty-five years. I am currently writing the History of Nursing at Sparrow. I am proud to be a participant of the Harvard Nurses Health Study, for over twenty-eight years. It is the longest most comprehensive study ever done on women. Their findings will impact women of the world. I have had a very exciting life!
Now that I am eighty-four years old, it is a joy to write about my experiences. It is the "stuff" life is made of. I wouldn't have missed this opportunity!
My earliest memories are about books that were read to me or given to me. My personal library was co-founded by Mary Poppins and Winnie the Pooh. Long trips to Michigan's upper peninsula -- or anywhere the family traveled -- meant hours of entertainment listening to my mother read aloud. I had heard The Agony and The Ecstasy, Ring of Bright Water, Bells on their Toes, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by the time I was eight years old, which is when I started writing my first book.
All my work life has been about language. I worked for eighteen years for Lansing Community College, sharing my love of words through teaching reading and writing. I was the director of Michigan Literacy, Inc. for several years, and worked in three independent bookstores. I am currently the manager of Archives Book Shop, write for Sparrow Health System, and am working on two mysteries and a screenplay.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, I lived there for one month before moving to Malverne, a mile square community on Long Island, nineteen miles east of Manhattan. At eighteen, I enrolled at Hartwick College, in Oneonta, New York where I met my soul mate, Bill, first day freshman year. From here the journey wound through West Virginia, Arizona, Missouri, and, finally, Michigan, which we've called home for the last twenty-five years.
For eighty-one years I've lived in the Webberville-Williamston, MI area. With the exception of living in Webberville from the seventh grade until I graduated from high school, I've always lived on a farm. At the present time my home is located on the same property where I began my married life in 1941, between those of my two daughters, five grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
When my girls were in high school, I began working at jobs off the farm. I worked for the Agriculture Economics Department at Michigan State University, the Agricultural Stabilization Office in Mason, and I was the Wheatfield Township Clerk for six years.
I was a 4-H leader for cooking, sewing and knitting for fifteen years. My daughters were active in 4-H with me.
As a teacher in elementary school, first in Germany and then in the United States, I was upset when my students always groaned about another social studies class. How could they find the study of history boring when I was intrigued by the impact of time and place on peoples' lives?
I was born in Bremen, Germany, in 1938, a year before Hitler invaded Poland. As a child, I huddled with my parents in bunkers during the nightly allied air raids on Berlin. We were in Berlin when the city fell to the fury of the Red Army. We greeted the American occupation forces in our part of the city and shivered hungrily through the Russian blockade. Little did I know then that one day I would marry an American, come to this country, and share my stories with my new friends.
The year 1999 brought more changes in my life. After thirty-nine years of teaching, I retired. Finally, I would have time to do whatever I wanted.
I am a full-time professor at Michigan State University and full-time jazz singer and mother. I have sung with The Count Basie Band, Rob McConnell and the Boss Brass, Mark Murphy, Milt Hinton, Clark Terry, Curtis Fuller, and Edgar Winter, among others. My latest CD release is with big-band on Chartmaker Jazz, called Sunny Wilkinson "High Wire." My other CDs are Alegria, on the Hibrite label, and Sunny Wilkinson, on the Positive Music label. I perform regularly at jazz festivals and clubs across the country and am the professor of jazz voice at MSU. I am the past president of the Michigan chapter of the International Association of Jazz Educators and the past chairperson for IAJE's Women's Caucus. I co-founded IAJE's "Sisters in Jazz" mentoring program.
When I was a young child, growing up in Chicago, I lost my mother. Following that event I had few opportunities to talk of her or share my memories with others who had known her. Consequently my memories were few and scattered. I was drawn to writing the stories in this collection as a way to revive my sense of our relationship.
I am consistently influenced by the stories of other peoples' lives and to the details of their experiences and emotions, both in fiction and in biography. These interests have influenced my style of writing. For me, life is the journey, not the arrival, and writing about this early part of my journey has made it a richer, clearer and more meaningful experience.
I moved to Michigan as a young woman, and raised my family here. I am a practicing psychotherapist.
I enjoyed almost everything from as far back as I can remember. I loved school. Music filled every extra moment. I practiced the piano until asked politely to stop. I learned the cello, the big bass fiddle and even played the bass drum in a parade. Life was fun! I went from soda jerk to advertising manager of a large department store.
I chased boys until I found the right one to spend my life with. Suddenly it was time to decide if selling tractors and decorating store windows was what life was all about. We decided to leave it all behind and go to Africa as missionaries. After four years of theological training we left family and homeland. Now fifty years later I can write about those wonderful years woven with joy, fear and heartache, but for me it is what life is all about.
I grew up in Sturgis, Michigan, which is located about fifty miles south of Kalamazoo. I received my public school education there beginning with kindergarten in 1956 until I graduated from Sturgis High School in 1969.
My best friend, Linda, and I visited her sister, Sandy, for a week during the summer before we began eighth grade. Sandy was attending Michigan State University. I decided within a day that I wanted to become a Spartan and green and white would be my primary colors.
I began my college career at MSU on September 22, 1969. My academic endeavors yielded a Bachelor's degree in Education and a Master's degree in English. Only one other student, a guy, shared two classes with me. I never could have imagined on my second day of school that my classmate, Paul Zang, would become my best friend, the love of my life, my husband, and the father of our two children, Eric David (03/19/79) and Anna Christine (06/14/85).
I had a rewarding career as a high school English, speech, and drama instructor for twenty-seven years. Even though I am unable to walk due to Multiple Sclerosis, my life has been a fascinating journey.
