Guest Blog--What's Your Job Description?

Meet Veronica Breen Hogle, today's Guest Blogger. Her thoughts for us are below:

Last week a tall, trim, silver-haired friend named Joe, two days younger than me died unexpectedly.

“His big generous heart just stopped beating.   He died quietly at home with me and our daughter, Anna,” his wife told me.   I joined a long line of people at the funeral home to pay my respects. Joe’s body wasn’t there because he’d willed it to the medical school at the University at Buffalo.  In the middle of the week  on a sweltering day,  people crowded into the church where he had been an influential leader to remember  Joe, the elementary school teacher, husband and father of five adult children.  His hobbies were folk dancing and magic.   People said Joe’s greatest gift was his ability to build community through activities.  This was his legacy.

I thought of my own legacy.  Because my mother left my father when I was two and couldn’t rear me herself, I grew up under the wings of my grandmother and her invalid sister and her husband in Bagenalstown, County Carlow, a little railway and flour mill town on the Barrow River, 68 miles south-east of Dublin.  These family members lived and fought during World War 1 and World War 2.  I listened to their stories so often, I felt like I’d been there in the trenches with them.  While telling me their stories and without noticing it, they gave me the job description of family historian.  I received the old family photographs, letters, postcards, and the bits and pieces that were important to them.

When I went to school, the nun wrote the title of our composition on the blackboard every Friday.

“Use your five senses. What does the person look like?  How does she sound? How does she smell?  What does she eat and what does it taste like?  Paint a picture with words” she told us.  On Monday, she had her hand out to receive the required two pages written with a wood pen with a two-penny removable, brass nib, which required great care to put it in and take out.  When ready to write in the circle of light from the oil lamp, I dipped the nib into the bottle of black Indian ink, tapped it lightly on the side of the glass bottle to remove any excess ink so it would glide across the paper with just the right sound of a squeak and not leave any forbidden  ink blots on the paper. 

No one from my family is alive in Bagenalstown now.  All are clustered together and tucked in beneath the clay in the little hilly cemetery two miles outside the town. The Barrow still flows through the town and the train stops in the railway station eight times a day on its way from Waterford to Dublin and back. Bagenalstown still has no traffic lights.  The Church Belll rings out the Angelus three times a day and the church clock rings out the hour and half hour.

It’s been a long time since I was groomed to be the family historian.   I will write about my family and the stories they told me around the sweet-smelling turf fires long before we had television or a radio.  I’m Just an ordinary person who uses writing and the five senses to take readers to a place in a certain time and introduce them to ordinary people who underneath what you see at first are extraordinary people in their own way.

So what’s your job description?  What gifts will you pass on?  What will people say about you when your heart just stops beating? 

Bio: Veronica Breen Hogle has won six prizes for writing short memoir pieces about growing up in small towns and villages along the Barrow River in Ireland.  Her stories appear in magazines, newspapers and books in the US, Canada and Ireland.  She’s the mother of four adult children and grandmother of four grandchildren. She enjoys working in her flower garden, folk dancing, travel, baking fruit cakes, being a host parent to international students and writing short stories about growing up in Ireland when only the hospital, the doctor and a few merchants had phones.  She puts her writing skills to work by writing grant proposals for nonprofit organizations and to elected officials suggesting ways they could improve services to her and their other customers.  

Read some of Veronica's stories at Our Echo. Select from a three page list of titles.

Travel Writing--Personal Essays and Articles

Ken and me in Germany

Summertime often means vacation time. We're ready to get away from our everyday routine, and for writers, that means a break from the keyboard. No matter what our jobs or daily routines involve, we all need a little time off to recharge our batteries. Half the fun of a vacation lies in the planning, and we probably spend a good many hours doing so. 

So, off you go to your vacation spot. Maybe it's the mountains or the seashore. Perhaps you're crossing an ocean to another continent. Wherever you go, keep your writer's mind active so that you can write some personal essays or travel articles when you return home. Keep a daily journal on any trip you take. It will be invaluable once you're home and want to write about the places you've been. Reading your travel journal will trigger other memories of your visit and help in recreating it for readers.

There are many different angles to use when writing about your travels. You can make it very personal when you visit the land of your ancestors, or maybe a place where you grew up but haven't seen in years. You might consider writing about only the food, or only the places where you lay your head each night--hotel, B&B, or resort. You could write about the transportation you used. Or the weather--was it the coldest the place has ever seen, or the hottest? Maybe the wettest. Somehow, weather allows for a lot of interesting writing. Maybe you experienced a horrendous storm while in the Caribbean. Tell the world what it was like. 

I started writing travel pieces when we first began overseas journeys. Family and friends at home all wanted to know about our trip, so rather than write a number of letters via e-mail, I chose to write one and send it to those interested. It wasn't long until I saw that I had the skeleton of a travel article in these missives. All I had to do was flesh them out and head to a market. Now, when Ken and I travel, I look with they eyes of both traveler and writer. 

Earlier this week, I recorded seven more stories for the internet radio station located here in my community. This is the third session they've asked me to do, so I decided to use travel essays and articles. One was about finding my roots in Ireland, another about a special place we stayed in South Africa. A contest winner about a Hungarian hotel in Germany was next, followed by an article about pub fare in the UK and Ireland. I read a personal essay about our visit to Lahr, Germany where Ken's grandfather Kopp grew up. Another personal essay detailed our visit to Blarney Castle in Ireland, where I had to decide whether to kiss the Blarney Stone or not. And the final one told about two of the Czech Exchange students at Kansas State University coming to the USA for the first time. You can see the great variety of things I found to write about on my travels. It needn't be overseas travel either. If you only go to a lake cottage an hour from home, you should be able to write about it. 

You can read the highlighted stories above which were published in other places but also posted at a website where writers post.