Glenda Bailey-Mershon

Write With Me Study Hall, Monday, April 11: Untraveled Paths

Where does your path lead? That’s the question of a lifetime, isn’t it?

My Unitarian-Universalist background tells me that discovering our own path is a life mission that we should support in each other, involving questioning, seeking, journeying toward a greater individual understanding of the Divine. Ah, the Divine–that which we all know when we feel it, but which we find so hard to accept when others see it differently.

This mystery of revealing a greater Truth is at the core of writing for me. I write toward what I want to understand, whether that is how it feels to truly see the future (“Being Emily”) or what it means to be an outsider finding one’s home (Eve’s Garden) or how individuals collide and make a new whole (“Space Walk”)*. All involve mystery to me.

Yesterday I wrote three paragraphs of a story that scared the bejesus out of me, a questioning of my entire being up to now. Today, I’m going to dive deeper into the abyss and see what I can bring up to air.

What is your mystery? Where does your path lead? What are you trying to reveal?

Image by Bertrand Zuchuat, used by permission.

* (Incidentally, you can read the first and last of those stories online for free by googling them with my name; Eve’s Garden is available from my publisher at http://www.twistedroadpublications.com, as well as online and brick-and-mortar stores.)

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Glenda Bailey-Mershon

Glenda Bailey-Mershon is the author of the novel Eve’s Garden (Twisted Road, 2014), the story of three generations of Romani women surviving in North Georgia, USA, during the 1960s. She is also the author of Weaver’s Knot: Poems (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2023) and other poetry titles, including sa-co-ni-ge/blue smoke: poems from the Southern Appalachians (Jane’s Stories) and Bird Talk: Poems (Wild Dove). A founder of the nonprofit, Jane’s Stories Press Foundarion, which presents the Clara Johnson Award for Women’s Literature, she edited four of their anthologies, the latest being Bridges and Borders, featuring immigrant women writers.

7 responses to “Write With Me Study Hall, Monday, April 11: Untraveled Paths”

cris at travelosopher

April 11, 2016

Those are some really good questions you ask!

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1. Glenda Bailey-Mershon
  
  April 11, 2016
  
  Thanks, Cris! Thanks for visiting. If you find they stir some further thoughts, please come back and share. I’m really interested in what other writers think about such things.
  
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Bobbi

April 11, 2016

Glenda – I haven’t delved that deeply into my motives for revisiting high school days. I guess I’m rewriting them, and myself in my heroine Randi – but what’s the point? Imagining better outcomes? Understanding what really happened? Or merely to entertain myself and my granddaughters in a mid-century version of the beloved Betsy series? Since Randi, et al., often dictate what I write, I guess I’ll just let them help me find the answers –??

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1. Glenda Bailey-Mershon
  
  April 11, 2016
  
  Nothing wrong with any of those motives. Lots of kids and adults learned from the Harry Potter series while being perfectly entertained. But I do find that my writing teaches me as I fumble along to its conclusion. I learned a lot about what I meant by “home” from Eve’s Garden, and each of the stories I mentioned helped my tease out some point of belief. But, heck, I hope they’re entertaining, too.
  
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Susanna J. Sturgis

April 13, 2016

“I write toward what I want to understand” — yes! Only for me it’s often the writing that reveals what I want to understand. The novel in progress started off with the idea of rescue: a dog and a girl both in need of rescue. (Trust me, rescuing the dog was a lot easier than rescuing the girl — I still haven’t figured that out yet.) Then my characters started introducing variations. One had tried and failed to rescue her father from a grief too deep to bear. Another had as a teenager managed to save herself from her violent, alcoholic family; as an adult she’s rescued many women and children from abusive situations but she’s still haunted by the younger sister she left behind. The dilemma that keeps coming up is “how do you know when to act, and how do you know what to do?” Which is something I’m always trying to figure out. Here’s hoping the novel will give me some suggestions.

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1. Glenda Bailey-Mershon
  
  April 15, 2016
  
  Sounds like your new novel has many layers, Susanna. Yes, that’s exactly what happens to me. I think I’m writing a simple sorry about X, then variations present themselves. I think that’ s what some people call the Muse urging us on!
  
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2. Glenda Bailey-Mershon
  
  April 15, 2016
  
  And most of the time I don’t have a clue when I start about what I know, if anything, about my topic, yet it always turns out somethings have been bubbling toward the surface for a while, and I only needed to open a vent for them to come spilling out. Then, I find what I don’t know, too, and have, usually, a wonderful time researching be connecting ideas. That’s the real joy of writing, for me–learning something new or something I didn’t realize I knew.
  
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