Crafting Your Own Life Story is ‘Like Therapy’

November 14, 2007
by Pat Nelson for
©South County News/The Daily News, reprinted with permission
Write Your Life Story students learn from each other, and I was on hand November 7 in Woodland when Lower Columbia College English students learned from them as well. Carmen Webb leads the group of 19 writing students, who meet from 1 to [...]

Unchained Doors…The Story of a Daughter Getting to Know Her Parents

A friend asked me a few years ago, “Pat, why don’t you write that book you’ve always talked about?”
“I already wrote a book,” I replied, “the one for credit union members.”
“No,” she responded, “I mean a book about the tuberculosis sanatorium where your parents met. You’re so passionate about that story when you tell [...]

Happy Halloween: Cormorants Bob for Fish

I write a weekly newspaper column about my community, and that means I have to keep my eyes open. I don’t like writing the same old stories that are written every few months, so I have to be even more alert, and I have to be ready to go when the story shows itself to [...]

Ahh, These Things Soothe My Spirit!

I’m so excited! This has been a good week. If you read my “about me” page, you saw that my story Blind Sighted was slated for inclusion in a Chicken Soup book that had to be canceled. Blind Sighted was the first story I submitted, so I was proud that it had been chosen and [...]

Four Walls…Four Different Walls

Every day, I planned to write. Every day, other demands got in the way. Writing had become something like dieting…I never got past the “good intention” stage.
I longed for a place where I could be completely alone, with no telephone, no responsibilities to anyone except myself, and no email to distract me or to add to [...]