About Nancy Chadwick

NANCY CHADWICK is an essayist, memoirist, and fiction writer. She got her first job at Leo Burnett advertising agency in Chicago. After a decade there, and later, another decade in corporate banking, she quit and began to write full time, finding inspiration from her years living in Chicago and in San Francisco. Nancy is the author of Under the Birch Tree: A Memoir of Discovering Connections and Finding Home, The Wisdom of the Willow, a novel, and has also written essays that have appeared in The Magic of Memoir: Inspiration for the Writing Journey, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Meaningful Conflicts – The Art of Friction, Writer’s Digest, blogs by the Chicago Writers Association Write City, and Brevity.

my week of nations

You never know who you’re gonna meet once you start talking to him or her. My week was looking like a travelogue of nations united. Megan is my go-to person for all things related to painting fingernails and toes. I paid her a visit one Monday morning. We got to talking about business, customers, how long she’d been there. She [...]

2014-08-11T18:47:32+00:00August 11, 2014|Categories: creative nonfiction, home, memoir, writers, Writing|Tags: , , , , |

feet make life stories

Do you take a look at your feet – ever? Or maybe you only notice them when you go to fit yourself with a new pair of shoes. But do you really look at them? Do you notice changes from chubby feet as a kid to now with slender toes and narrow arch? If only your feet could narrate a [...]

Emotional Writing

In Jill Jepson's latest blog post, she suggests we let anger be our writing guide. Jill, author of blog, Writing a Sacred Path, tells us to listen to what our anger is telling us. Is it evoking a fear? Is it defining our boundaries? The more we write, the more we can discover the sources of our anger. In doing [...]

A Book Report

I’m going to write a book report. Some of you may not know what I’m talking about but can probably deduce that I’ll be writing a report on a book. When I had book report assignments in school, I had to discern what the story was about. Otherwise known as “theme,” sometimes I thought I didn’t really get the entire [...]

Memoir-Making Sense

I read a line somewhere, sometime, during one of many memoir writing researching binges. At the time, I was working backwards. I wrote a memoir, well, a very first draft, and then I read anything I could about the non-fiction category. Headlines stating "Personal essay" or "First-person essay" also caught my attention. I Googled and searched, walked Barnes and Nobles [...]

2014-07-16T19:16:23+00:00July 16, 2014|Categories: memoir, writers, Writing|Tags: , , |

ACCEPTANCE

I read this when the day has ended and I need to breathe deeply dispelling all the shallow gulps of air grabbed during the day that have accumulated to where I feel airless, depleted.   When your past comes to live in the woods behind your house, you must go to the window, forgive yourself once again, and welcome the [...]

2014-07-15T19:45:19+00:00July 15, 2014|Categories: spiritual writing, writing life|Tags: , , , |

Dottie Dog

  Dottie-3 mos. On a last day of June the best (and at times) the worst distraction came into my life. She weighed six pounds at eight weeks old, sporting long, tan floppy ears. Her black, tan and white body supported by four white stocky legs stood at attention as she let loose a howl rendering eardrums buzzing [...]

2014-07-15T16:36:19+00:00July 15, 2014|Categories: creative nonfiction|Tags: , |

Flight Immersion

I hit the road early this day last year with blue skies and a sun that showed the exceptional day well with a temperature of 71 degrees and light winds. Forty-five minutes later, hangar 1005 was difficult to find among the winding, curvy access roads. I didn’t even know I was in terminal 371784. I thought a mere technicality, but [...]

2014-07-01T19:06:32+00:00July 1, 2014|Categories: creative nonfiction, memoir|Tags: , , , , |

from “Under the Birch Tree” -summertime (full essay)

I grew up attending Holy Cross Catholic grade school in Deerfield where having a conversation with God, or “maintaining a dialogue” as the nuns told us, was as important to our education as getting good grades. I was told that if you prayed, evoking God in your “dialogue,” you will be okay. Trust God and you won’t fear anything. I [...]

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