Contributed by Rebecca Goodrich
There’s a name for people who write a memoir: time traveler. Anyone who’s even attempted to write a memoir of any sort must delve into the past, with all its pain and joy. It’s often a perilous adventure, to do that personal archaeology and discover much—beautiful and heart-breaking both—you didn’t even suspect of lying beneath the surface.
As some of you know, I wrote a memoir, finishing the draft in 2019. Then I thought I’d pop down to Arizona for a bit.
Some great ideas are destined to turn out not-so-great. In October 2019 I left Alaska for what I thought would be a two-year stint in Sun City, Arizona. I knew already I wouldn’t like the heat but wasn’t there for the climate. I moved 2670 miles closer to family and friends I didn’t see often. It will be fun, I thought. It will be easy, I thought.
With ten times the population of Alaska, there were possibilities of meeting many nice creative folks, and I planned to do lots of writing and editing.
Those cheer-leading phrases in my brain knew nothing about the future. Nobody knew there would be a worldwide pandemic. (I didn’t do well with quarantine, doing little or no writing or editing.) Nor did I imagine I’d get breast cancer, requiring a third year in a distant place to start and finish treatment.
But when you get cancer, you hop on that horse and ride that bronco as long as you must. I did eventually meet lots of nice creative folks, just mostly over Zoom.
Cirque literary journal published a chapter of my forthcoming memoir last year. This year that chapter received first place at national level competition run by National Federation of Press Women, an 85-year-old organization, with chapters in Alaska since 1961. See link: https://arizonaprofessionalwriters.org/2022/06/28/rebecca-goodrich-nfpw-award-winner/
Even better, you can read that memoir chapter for free online. Go to cirquejournal.com. Click on Back Issues. Look for Volume 11, No. 2, with the painting of the red salmon on the cover. Check the table of contents for non-fiction and you’ll see my name, and well, you know the drill.
In further book news, the chapbook about my father, Emergency Rations: How One Young Tail Gunner Survived World War Two, is under consideration at Fathom Publishing in Anchorage. Currently it’s available as an eBook on Smashwords.com.
Finally, now, this time traveler has packed up her laptop and her cat, to return to “the brilliant stars in the northern sky.” It will be a ground-kissing moment.
See you end of September. I’ll be staying in Wasilla initially, hanging my Consulting Editor shingle up in the Great Land once again.
Consulting editor and author Rebecca Goodrich forsook the fool’s gold of California to build a houseboat in Dutch Harbor in 1994. In 1998 she moved with her family to Anchorage, and in 1999, to Wasilla for three years. Active in Alaska’s literary community since touching down on Amaknak Island, feel free to contact Goodrich by phone: 480-682-7520, or email: scribing@hotmail.com.