Who I Am... And the Difference I Strive to Make

I’m honored to be recognized as a teaching working creative, as a journalist, media advisor, and adoption advocate. I realize I stand among many DSHA alums who have achieved great things and have contributed to making the world a better place for future generations.

When teaching writing courses, I give my students an assignment to create a visual power point or collage and begin with I am … to tell the class who they uniquely are. I’ve decided the best way to talk about my life and work is to do the same. So, this is who I am….

I was born to a road builder, and my mother, a stay-at-home mom. I grew up with Saturday rides on bulldozers, graders, and paving machines, along ribbons of dirt that would become I-94.

The second child in a family of nine wild children, so wild some neighbor kids were forbidden to play with us, I sometimes tell people I was raised with wolves. My family was huge and my boyfriend, Jeff, who is an only child, told me, “This isn’t a family, it’s an experience.”

If you know me, you’ll be surprised to learn I was the quiet one, the imaginative one who feared I would grow an alligator’s tail if I were ever bitten, the dreamy one who hoped to grow up to study the underwater habits of mermaids and mermen. I was sure they existed.

I fell into books before I was school-age and spent most summers curled in a wingchair in my parents’ living room with a book. The printer’s ink depicting characters, words, and worlds ran through my veins and filled my heart.

Although I was a good student, I feared the playground and hated school, often pretending to have an earache and even traipsing through poison ivy — don’t do that, it’s painful — so that I could stay home in bed and read, or create my own stories and poems with paper dolls. I made shoebox homes for them in the town of Floor located in my bedroom.

In high school, I never felt I was one of the beautiful girls, and I soon learned that trying to change to be one of that desired group took away my voice, a voice that was growing stronger and encouraged by some of my teachers. And I loved DS because it was the first time I wasn’t surrounded by siblings. It was my chance to find out who I was and who I wanted to be. I practiced using my voice.

I used it to write for Divine Savior’s literary magazine and to create in the art room. I asked questions of authority about the Vietnam War. About honesty and truth. About the ways women could seek empowerment. I was finding my place in the world, and it wasn’t a traditional path.

Sr. Marilee once reprimanded me and told me I was a leader, leading my friends down the wrong path. Shocked, I responded, “Thank you. No one’s ever called me a leader before.” That, I’m afraid, got me in more trouble. I’m sure she thought I was being mouthy. But I realized from that moment that I could use my voice to lead, to teach, to find truth in research. I think that’s the moment I became a writer, journalist, and advocate for others, although this wasn’t quite in focus yet.

At the time, I chose to follow my heart and do my own thing. Much to my mother’s chagrin, the bedroom I shared with two sisters became a garden with walls painted with psychedelic flowers. I filled my room with music that flowed like water through me.

I wrote wickedly bad poetry and read everything I could get my hands on especially the books my mother hid in her bedside drawer. I fell in love with that boy who once said, “This isn’t a family, it’s an experience.”

I don’t talk about my faith because it’s personal to me, but my actions represent my values. I chose my career path, and my family with those values close to my heart.

I don’t recall anyone talking about careers or pushing me to go to college. I was surrounded by moms who stayed home to raise their kids. But I’m sure my mother spoke about it. After all, she had attended Mount Mary. She surely spoke to me about their art program.

And I dreamed of becoming an artist. But I wanted to escape my loud and wild siblings, my village, but not my boyfriend. My mother had different plans. So I went to Mount Mary hoping to become a visual artist and, instead, became a wife, a high school English teacher, and a writer and would become a professor at Mount Mary University.

At Marquette, I earned my journalism Masters, and still later, I obtained an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

I’m a teaching writer with degrees that helped me hone my skills. I’m a volunteer, mom through adoption and nana, an adoption advocate who has expanded my family each time one of my kids finds a birth parent or sibling, an advocate for women’s rights and empowerment. I’ve created parenting materials for caregivers as a contributing editor at MetroParent Magazine and for the Adoption Network of Wisconsin. I have written books on adoption, and written articles on foster care for Milwaukee Magazine. My daughter, Amanda co-edited Silent Embrace, Perspectives on Birth and Adoption with me in efforts to give voice to searching adoptees and birth parents.

I’ve written about the arts. And biographies of flawed heroes like the first woman of rock and roll Janis Joplin in the hope that readers see they can become the heroes in their own messy lives. My flawed hero through high school and beyond was the Queen of Rock and Roll, Janis Joplin. So I wrote a book about her and it won the American Library Association’s YALSA award. When I told my dad, he said, “That’s great. What is it?” The YALSA is the equivalent of an Academy Award in juvenile nonfiction. The only comparable award is the National Book Award.

I’m all of these things as a public person. And I’m more. The whisper of solitude in a rocking chair as I turn the pages of my books, and journals, and sketchpads, the sweet liquid of love that overflows like the banks of a rain soaked river within my family, the bookish angel who sometimes wears beads, and feathers, and mismatched earrings, the magic found in moments such as when a red dragonfly perches on my foot, or when the sun splashes across my face, or the smell of grass pours into the opened window. My students’ stories flood my soul with excitement when literature and art fever their discussions, creating layers of light against shadow. These capture my most soul-filled moments.

I am the stories I’ve written whether they’re fiction or biography; parts of me are in every character I write. I am Isabella Rose who seeks power, Ella learning a path through grief after her sister dies, and Tyler who makes metal jewelry and wants to work at Harley Davidson, the writers Amy Tan and the father of young adult literature Robert Cormier. I am as confused as Fiona, a good girl with a dark secret, and I am a soul sister to that wild woman rocker with the frizzy hair and attitude, Janis Joplin, even though I struggle to sing.

And now it’s your turn. Dr. Jane Goodall said, “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”

How are your dreams and experiences shaping you? Who do you wish to become? You can be the hero in your own messy life, flaws and all. So I end by asking you, what will you do to bring about the positive change you want to see in the world?