Guest This Week: Eileen Enwright Hodgetts
At the Online Mindful Writers Group (OMWG) Page, I invite a new guest-of-honor every week. This week’s guest is USA Today Best Selling Author, Eileen Enwright Hodgetts. To read her daily posts go to the Home Page on this website and click the middle button, “Visit and Join.” Here is her bio:
Eileen Enwright Hodgetts wrote her first “Novel” at the age of 12, it was five pages long and was a murder mystery. She was sure it would be the key to fame and fortune but no such luck. Now very many years later she has come to realize that there is not just one key, but many keys, and they are all available to us if we just keep working at it. In 1999 Eileen abandoned her search for success as a playwright and took on the more than fulltime task of running a 15 year mission to Uganda in East Africa. During those years of traveling back and forth she was unable to write anything except budgets and reports. When the mission was completed, she turned to writing novels and currently has thirteen novels in print, on audio and in e-book format through her private imprint Emerge Publishing. She has one nonfiction book, a study of African polygamy published in conjunction with the Archbishop of Uganda. Her plays are still circulating in the theatre community with performances in the US and the UK. Her stage play Titanic to All Ships is currently being filmed as a major motion picture (don’t even ask her about working with screenwriters). Her World War 2 Novel Air Raid was named in the top 100 books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews. Eileen is a graduate of Ewell College in England. She lives in Baden Pennsylvania with her husband Graham. They have two UK born adult children, one adopted Ugandan child, four grandsons, one dog and one cat and a great many goldfish. She came to Pennwriters by way of Mindful Writers and credits that Mindful Writer Tribe with keeping her on track and still writing. Follow her on the website: www.eileenenwrighthodgetts.com
October 5, 2020 Madhu has asked me to be Guest Host for the next seven days. I feel highly honored (or honoured) to be asked and I hope that my thoughts will help to spur your thoughts and together we’ll have a really great week. As I begin this piece I have had to make a decision, and I have decided to use American spelling. I have been in the States for a long time now and I think it comes more naturally, so the “u” in honoured was my last superfluous “u”!Madhu asked me to write about reading so I begin this process by saying that I have no memory of learning to read. I cannot remember a time when I could not read or did not want to read. I assume that this is because learning to read came easily. It does not share a place in my memory alongside the Chamber of Horrors containing all forms of math, including long division, fractions and especially algebra. As I don’t remember the process of learning to read or even being read to as a child (more of that later) I thought I would write about my own children, because I do remember helping them to read, and I remember introducing them to the delights of storytelling … man’s most natural form of entertainment.
I began telling stories to the children when they were no more than two years old, and the hero of our stories was a creature known as “Baby Duck”. No books were involved, just a couple of kids ready for bed and a rubber duckie who had adventures (none of them particularly terrifying and all resulting in a happy ending]. We moved on to Blue Boy, a collie dog, and his friend Sarge, a police dog. I should mention that Sarge was an Alsatian because that’s what German Shepherds are called in England and my children were English. Blue Boy and Sarge got into all kinds of scrapes and their adventures continue until today, as my daughter has adopted them and told her own stories to her own children. We also had some therapeutic stories about a child who was afraid of motorcycles, (because I had a child who was afraid of motorcycles) and in all these stories a motorcycle managed to save the day. That kid is no longer afraid of motorcycles… he’s no longer a kid… and I’m not sure he remembers how we cured him but it worked because he went on to own a quite terrifying motorcycle.
This is just a short introduction to my life of reading and storytelling but I think it raises some journal questions about a very important subject.
JOURNAL PROMPT Do you remember learning to read? Was it easy for you or did you struggle? Did you immediately realize that reading had opened a door to a world of adventure or did you have to wait for that one “special” book to grasp your imagination and keep you reading until late in the night?
MEDITATION PROMPT Shall we begin the week by Awakening the Senses?