Guest Blogger: Loretta Rogers

Welcome to today's special guest, Loretta Rogers....

Thanks, Denyse for inviting me to guest blog today. Rather than pitching my novels, I decided to voice a few thoughts about an irresistible urge that perhaps affects other authors.

Why do I write stories that in all likelihood few people will read? Why do I sit in my isolated office, at a desk overflowing with paperwork and file cabinets that won’t shut? These are questions that I occasionally ask myself. On unproductive days, I secretly fear that I chose writing in order to foster my aversion to housework. I mean, it’s scary when the mounding piles of dust bunnies don’t affect me. On creative days, I know with unwavering conviction that I write because I feel called to do it from deep within my heart.

I remind myself that many of these pesky distractions from writing, like cooking, folding laundry, paying bills, and grocery shopping afterward, have been inspirational. For example, it’s Spring and my hands itch to dig in the dirt. I love the feel of cool, sandy Florida soil in my hands as I planted new geraniums and potted caladium bulbs. Last night I listened to a symphony of owls calling across the swamp in back yard, and later the screeching of feral cats sent shivers up and down my arms, but I sat and I listened. This seems “unproductive” but each opened my soul to writing in ways I wouldn’t have foreseen.

I write because images and characters and rhythms swirl about in my head, wanting to be written down. I’m so overcome by springtime around me and thoughts of past springs that I scribble thoughts in an old spiral notebook I keep beside my recliner. Or maybe I open my grandmother’s music box and recall sitting at her knee, as a child, while she plaited my braids.

I write because I love language. Words persuade; words heal. Words convey the heart’s passion in ways that touching can’t. Words are like a puzzle-- some fit together at the oddest places to create a picture of beauty or violence or love, while others don’t fit at all.

A little over a week ago, I underwent a bilateral mastectomy. Cancer is never a word a woman yearns to hear. I decided to embrace the disease, to rewrite my will, and to keep a journal of all the beautiful words that lure me to write. I thought about revising my living will, and decided that if I were to lie dying, my family could withhold food and water, but not books of poetry, or books on tape. To me words are like water in a desert and food for thought.

Most of all, I write to embrace other people, people staring at computer screens, bent over laundry baskets or kitchen sinks or tomato vines or pea patches, struggling with love and loss and growing old. These connections make me feel less alone and afraid, and more alive and infinite. I will keep writing, because writing makes me feel as though I fit into a larger verse than a spare bedroom over looking a spring-fed creek.

Loretta C. Rogers who also writes under the pseudonym L. W. Rogers is author of best-selling novella and winner of The Wild Rose Press through the Garden Gate contest, Cactus Rose category, Isabelle and the Outlaw, and The Twisted Trail published by Avalon Books. Loretta would like to invite all of you to visit her website: http://www.lorettacrogersbooks.com/