About

Glenda Bailey-Mershon

Before I was about 40, I did not take myself seriously as a writer.Writing was something I did, from the slips of paper crammed into shoeboxes under my bed in childhood, to the notes scribbled on the backs of notepads during my time as a university administrator, to the countless memos and reports I wrote as a leader in the Illinois National Organization for Women.

It was true that I had published an occasional poem and an article or two and even, once, a short story. But that was not central to my intent to make a difference in the world, in which I had pulled myself up by some well-worn bootstraps, and so felt compelled to reach down and bring a few folks along with me.  Education was my ticket out of the Southern Appalachian mill towns where I was raised, and I tried to extend that ticket for others. I succeeded. I began a peer tutorial center, wrote grants to provide access to degree programs, and counseled students from all over the world in a doctoral program.

Then something happened that would point me to a new definition of success.

When I was thirty-three, an accident on the way to work had sandwiched me between a van and another car. At first, I managed to keep going in my routine, despite my injuries, working on my doctorate in the evening, as an administrator by day, taking care of my two boys, being an equal partner with my husband to keep all cars on track while I plowed down Illinois’ highways in the quest to pass the ERA and find better funding for women’s needs. I even made time to swim laps almost daily. But, one day, when I was 39, I stepped out of a university building to return to my office, and was struck in the middle of the quadrangle by a sudden paralysis in my left leg.

That inability to move one part of my anatomy would soon become a continuing battle with pain, numbness, and fatigue. The damaged nerve roots in my spine had issued a warning. A year later, I was retired on disability from my university job and had been forced to drop out of my degree program while I pursued almost daily therapy. And, then, the unimaginable: while returning home on the day I was released from therapy, a car from nowhere plowed into my rear bumper and––again––sent me to the emergency room. I wondered through a semi-conscious state, “Why do people keep hitting me?”

Now I know the answer. It was so that I would rediscover the joy I had felt as a seven-year-old, when, asked by the principal to help her put together a bulletin board on reading, I looked up at the cork surface and imagined these words sailing there:

There is no frigate like a book

to take us lands away

nor any coursers like a page

of prancing poetry.

It was a quote from Emily Dickinson’s poem, of course, but to me it was the sum total of why I read: to travel, to explore, to think deeply about the state of being alive. But, as an adult woman, I saw few books that really spoke to me or encompassed my experience of being born into poverty in a mixed-ethnic family. So I did not read as widely as a writer, much less a semi-conscious human being, should.

Of course, being forced to retire from full-time work did not stop me. It did send me in new directions. With some friends, I helped Linda Mowry and other women found a feminist book store, Prairie Moon, which survived for a miraculous five years in the midst of the big-box takeover of book selling. On my own, I imagined into being the Jane’s Stories anthologies by women writers, which are still going strong. In 2012, we will publish our fourth collection. The nonprofit that grew from that first anthology, which was published by my own small press, Wild Dove, is the evergreen  Jane’s Stories Press Foundation.

I have published by now quite a few more poems, a few short stories, nonfiction articles, and book reviews, and am now finishing my first novel, entitled Eve’s Garden.

With this blog, I telegraph my latest intention: to tout stories by and about women that display a larger picture of what it means to be human and female. To delight in the diversity of the human species and survey both the thrills and dangers of our common fate.

My six words of advice to a new writer: Get better and wiser every day.

This is your life, this lust for books and experience. Drink deeply, and I hope you will return here often for inspiration. And that you will find it, here or elsewhere.