And here comes a young woman headed straight for me. She looked excited with wide-eyed brown eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, her reddish-brown hair pulled tight in a ponytail, revealing a fresh young, round face, and dimples like parenthesis around her lipstick-stained lips. She stopped in front of me where I was sitting behind a table and behind copies of my [...]
You will take over 200 million steps in your lifetime. Imagine if your feet could narrate a travelogue, report miles and destinations, when they are at rest, and injuries they may have sustained. What would they say? They dance and run, burrow in sand, hold you in mountain pose. Your feet connect you. Your feet track memories, record the spot [...]
Do you find yourself taking an unexpected pause during your daily travels? For unexplained reasons you stop to consider a feeling or emotion, even a memory that has suddenly hit you? Consider three scenarios. The first, you take a walk, a hike maybe, along a dirt path through a forest preserve where there is an abundance of trees and other [...]
Memories of growing up in a north suburb of Chicago remain vivid with me today. In my memoir, Under the Birch Tree, due out in June, I recall my little-girl self’s life in my small town of Deerfield, growing up in the neighborhood of Colony Point, and on Carlisle Avenue where my home, a “red brick colonial was the unspoiled [...]
One would think someone who claims a writing journey of almost 20 years had learned a thing or two. I’m not quite convinced. Sure, when I was fifteen I wrote a poem about a tree and finding security with it, how I grow in tandem with the tree’s growth and how I discovered spirituality among all things nature. I also [...]
So delighted to have The Whirlwind Review feature my essay "My Pink Book." Sharing my words with you through this link: http://whirlwindreview.com/2016/09/19/nancy-chadwick-my-pink-book/#comment-489
The middle of the upstairs hall in the house on Carlisle Avenue was the kids’ bathroom where a bathtub paralleled one wall and a toilet filled the remaining small boxlike space. A beige Formica counter ran the length of the entire opposite wall with muddy blue double sinks planted in the long flat surface. And then there was the small [...]
My decision to leave my hometown of Chicago came without lengthy contemplation. After three unemployments in six years during my budding advertising career post college and eighteen months working in corporate banking, the city turned its back by not bestowing its wealth. My weary footsteps had marked every city corner, intersection, advertising and employment agency during my interviews and [...]
A writing prompt from one of my writing groups was to write about a summer day. We were to write a scene, from 2 different POV's - a child and adult, from a childhood memory. I pulled a scene from my memoir (in progress) where I was having my picture taken on my first day of kindergarten. When I completed [...]
Taken from a 2000 word essay, this short is the beginning to the unfolding of my spirituality. I heard the call. It wasn’t a whisper or a delicate voice or loud words urging me to transcribe thoughts to paper. The call did sound like an alarm, telling me it was time to awaken a dormant spirit. I was ready to [...]