Three Marriages

A long time ago, I set out to tell my story and make a book. The result was Three Marriages: lies I’ve lived by and it was self-published July 2014, which brought me peace through connection with family and friends who read it.

The story begins with my experience of being widowed, which led me to college as a single mother where I met and married a man who took me overseas to begin a new life. However, it didn't turn out the way I expected. I divorced my second husband in an Abu Dhabi Sharia court when the Emirati man who would become my third husband rescued me -- I'd been falsely accused and was at risk of being jailed. I fled that third marriage ten years later.

Three Marriages was my investigation into what had happened.

Between 2017 - 2024, I wrote The Writer's Vow: A Thread of Instinct Through the Veil of Marrying Others to Marry Myself to tell the story of what followed -- a fourth marriage. Writing it was an arduous journey and turned out to be so much more complex than I anticipated. I think of it now as my Seven Year Persephone Period during which time I set out to write a sequel to Three Marriages but it turned into a prequel when a third manuscript followed. It seemed I had a trilogy until the two new manuscripts morphed into a wholly new story in a new voice!

Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld and Goddess of Growth, had something to teach me.

I learned that the experience of betrayal was an invitation to land on real ground within myself. What I had called disappointment turned out to be the initial stage of emancipation into my womanhood. The measure of my courage was my willingness to keep living. Every man I loved brought me closer to the earth of my being. I had to walk through every season of my own learning. And my husbands turned out to be my soul's companions on the journey. I could be nothing but grateful for everything I'd endured.

The Writer's Vow has been submitted to agents and publishers. Will it become a book for readers? I believe it will. It is worthy of readers. In the making of it, I've had the good fortune of working with Victoria Nelson as mentor and editor, which has earned me writerly stripes; a somewhat grueling, generally pleasurable and surprisingly fulfilling process. I honour this challenging process I continue to engage as writer and I'm devoted to the creative practice I've established. I welcome the next literary adventure.

My autoethnographic journey has produced four book-length manuscripts. I have investigated my lived experience to tell story that is relevant for any woman seeking to understand the relational dynamics in her psyche. For the primal ground upon which all women stand is giving us a great task today — we must find the way to redeem feminine wisdom from within. The invitation is to achieve this while holding the delicate balance between light and dark, growth and decay, life and death, giving up and moving forward. For Persephone lives in the feminine soul.

I’m currently learning the craft of writing a novel. The Lost Sister's Garden is a love story about a woman who inherits a cottage in England from a great aunt she has never known. In her quest to understand the past, she follows a secret trail left for her by her grandmother. It takes her on a journey of self-discovery as her female lineage comes to light and her family's legacy comes alive.

It is great relief to be playing in a new current of my imagination to write fiction rather than working in the processes of remembering to write memoir. The writing journey is a mysterious endeavour! And frankly, it's bloody hard work. But I believe it is also noble work for the love of humanity and to this end, I am a writer who cannot not write!

“ The day a person finds out he's a writer is usually not the day he finishes his first story or poem or the day he is first published, but much, much farther down the road. It is the day he realizes he possesses a certain cluster of psychological traits that forms the writing obsession. Far from feeling crowned with laurel, this person is likely to experience a reaction akin to hearing on his 21st birthday, that he is descended from a venerable line of Transylvanian vampires and he is one, too; there is no escape!  For by this time he has probably had ample opportunity to observe, in himself and in other writers, some of the psychological stigmata of the creative person: hypersensitivity, self-absorption, compulsive behavior, ungenerous ambition, and all those related traits that tend to cancel out the romantic aura the profession holds in the eyes of the uninitiated.”

~ Victoria Nelson, On Writer's Block

 

My initiation into the art of storytelling demanded investigation and healing through encounter of lived experience in order to reckon with what I'd created unconsciously so I was able to resurrect and recreate what is possible now.

For in the end, life is just a story. And story is change. So when one book ends, another begins.

Human beings must free the feminine from within human consciousness before women and men will be free in human civilization.

"Writing has been, and always will be, our foremost means of modifying human
consciousness. You are modifying the consciousness of the reader and therefore
you are modifying the reality of the reader. Writing will modify the reality and the
consciousness of the entire species and, inevitably, will mean modifying the
consciousness of the writer themselves." ~ Alan Moore