A life-long lover of reading and writing, Mary Jo has been a Story Circle Network member for nearly twenty years, serving as an editor, a book reviewer, and a women’s writing circle facilitator. Most recently, she has been a three-time Program Chair for the National Conference, Stories from the Heart, a board member, and facilitates workshops and a women’s life-writing circle. Her stories have appeared in anthologies, and “I Can’t Breathe” is in Inside and Out: Women’s Truths, Women’s Stories. Mary Jo’s degree is in Secondary English Education/Educational Psychology; her work appears in varied blogs and periodicals, on her blog, Facebook, and Twitter.

When and how did you become interested in women’s writing?

In some visceral sense, I always knew I’d write a book one day. I thought it would be a mystery, until, during my fourth decade, life brought a profound event that changed my life. I immersed myself into intense, diversified personal work for several years in order to process the roots of that mysterious incident. Then my children were grown and I ached to recreate my life. In 2000, I moved 500 miles to a small cabin in the woods of the Blue Ridge Mountains to live in solitude and started writing some of my life stories. Soon after, my love of mysteries linked me to author Susan Wittig Albert, who also founded the Story Circle Network five years earlier, an international organization dedicated to women wanting to “document their lives and explore their personal stories through journaling, memoir, autobiography” and more. I joined two online writing circles, which brought me together with women all over the country also writing their life stories. There, in cyberspace, I discovered the power of writing, sharing, and hearing others’ stories. My human services profession became my day job and I became a writer with a passion to support other women writers.   

How has living a country life in Virginia’s Central Shenandoah Valley helped your writing?

I pared my life down to simple here and have thrived. This place of gorgeous mountains, streams, woods, and meadows, as well as the birds and animals who reside with me in our peace-filled solitude is an ever-nurturing springboard for touching the deeper parts of my soul. Rarely do I have trouble finding meaningful topics to write about. If that happens, I go for a walk.

Have you seen changes in the opportunities for women as far as being writers and poets?           

I love the word “better.” When I pull a few weeds from my garden, or do any small task, I say, “Better.” Opportunities for women writers are better now than I’ve ever seen and my heart sings when I see the growth of our diversity. I’m happy to be present in this time of significant change for women.

Please tell us about the upcoming release in October of your memoir, Patchwork: A Memoir of Love and Loss.

My memoir has been developing through several revisions in the last sixteen years, evolving from a personal healing journey into a story I wanted to leave to my children to better know their history. My decision to publish followed slowly and now, close to that goal, I am grateful for that decision. Writing the book profoundly changed my life and now publication continues to further a process I can describe best as a remarkable journey.   

It was exciting to learn you share my interest in quilting. When did it begin?

I loved sewing from the time I watched my mother make a dress for my first day of school. Then I learned to sew in 7^th grade and loved the art. Later, in my mid-twenties, a city girl, I married a country boy and we settled on his small dairy farm in a tiny Catskill Mountain community. There, women still canned food and quilted as they had through the centuries. My first friend taught me how to quilt. I was enchanted. We went on to facilitate a town quilt that hangs today in the Bovina Town Museum, still a tangible, tactile portrait of our way of life in the 70s.

Those were the sweet beginnings of a rich attachment to quilting and my community. Forty years later I can never forget that circle of women sitting around the antique quilt frame, quilting our tiny stitches and sharing stories about our lives.

Who are your favorite writers?

All my life I’ve loved mysteries, from Nancy Drew on to Agatha Christie. I was unaware of the scarcity of women authors until suddenly there they were: Amanda Cross (Carolyn Heilbrun,) P.D. James, Sara Paretsky, Charlotte McLeod, Patricia Wentworth, and Sue Grafton. How I wish I knew how Grafton planned to end the Kinsey Millhone series!

I can’t pass by a new book by Elizabeth George, Jacqueline Winspear, Louise Penny, Susan Wittig Albert, Julia Spencer Fleming, Nevada Barr, and J.A. Jance, to name just a few. Then I fell in love with memoir and have so many favorite authors: Alice Koller, Pat Harmon, Sue Monk Kidd, Nancy Mairs, Natalie Goldberg, Terry Tempest Williams, Christina Baldwin, Ann Patchett, and more.

Tell us about your Women’s Life-Writing and Older Women’s Legacy workshops.

Older Women’s Legacy workshops were developed through a grant to Story Circle Network several years ago. Experienced teachers wrote an excellent facilitator guide and corresponding workbook for a five-week workshop. When complete, each woman takes home a notebook of her legacy stories. When I teach a Women’s Life-Writing workshop, I use Susan Wittig Albert’s Writing from Life: Telling Your Soul’s Story as the basis of the six-week workshop, a book she wrote after years of teaching life-writing.

One of the greatest honors I’ve had in my workshops is witnessing how many women start out feeling their stories are ordinary and unimportant. As each week passes, with mindful listening and positive feedback given to the stories, a nurturing connection deepens. As women have done for centuries, we learn that we are not alone, that our stories are not just our stories, but they connect with each other’s stories. Ultimately, we realize that our stories are really every woman’s story.  

What’s your favorite quotation?

Goethe’s words are taped to my monitor:

Whatever you think you can do, Or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace, and power in it.

 I collect kindness quotations. Two of my favorites are: 

            My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness  – the Dalai Lama.

            Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you—and go after those things as if nothing else matters. Because, actually, nothing else does. – George Sanders (a college commencement address).

What advice would you give struggling authors?

Write every day if only for 20 minutes: in a journal, a blog, a letter to a friend or relative, on a computer or with pen and paper. Find writing peers and make friends. Read voraciously, especially books in your genre of interest. Study good writers. Feel free to let your words rest, then return to them. Stay with it. You will find your way. 

Thank you, Carol.

– Carol Smallwood