My first book, Late Born Child, published in 2013, is a memoir. “Write about what you know” is often the advice given to an inexperienced writer. The advice might just as well be: BECOME A STORYTELLER!
Perhaps this short excerpt from Late Born Child, may inspire you to do just that.
The first chapter from Late Born Child:
“I was a late born child. My family arrived in Macon, Georgia in the fall of 1947 from Wilmington, North Carolina, where they had spent the World War II years. They would soon find their own personal contribution to the post-war Baby Boom had begun.
That fall, my sister Nan was almost eighteen, having just graduated from high school. My brother Bruce was fourteen and not very happy about the fact that he would be starting high school at Lanier High School for boys, which had a JROTC program—but as its name implied, no girls. He had hoped to go to a co-ed high school in Wilmington, just as Nan had.
My mother and father had been married twenty years. She was thirty-nine and pregnant with number three: me. Mama was a Thompson from Toombs County, so coming to Macon was coming home to Georgia. Fine with her.
My father was thirty-nine and starting a new job at production manager of the Wesleyan Christian Advocate, a weekly newspaper operated by the Methodist Churches of the South Georgia Annual Conference. He had lost his last job, at a Wilmington daily newspaper, to a returning serviceman who was related to the publisher.
I was born on June 16, 1948, and by the time I was in the first grade, the only child in the house: the apple of my father’s eye and my mother’s daily challenge.
While I knew that the four of them loved me, I did arrive quite a few years late. Bruce turned fifteen just two months after my birth and at six months of age I was baptized on Nan’s nineteenth birthday. During the baptism ritual at our little Methodist church, I grabbed the netting of the faux veil of her brand-new hat and held on so tightly I almost pulled the whole thing off her head. Mama had to uncurl my fingers in order to detach me from the net. This proved to be prophetic regarding my future antics.
Clearly there was no way I would be able to catch up with them. They would always be smoother and smarter than me, always knowing just what to do in every situation. But I would be out there fumbling around trying to figure it out, creating confusion all along the way. Sometimes they would chuckle about things I did not understand. This usually left me wondering if I had caused them to laugh. But they endured me and I endured. I wasn’t going anywhere. They were stuck with me, for better or worse, usually worse. I tried everyone’s patience as I tried to “get it” —whatever “it” was.”
