Leaving the Hall Light On: A Mother's Memoir of Living with Her Son's Bipolar Disorder and Surviving His Suicide by Madeline Sharples

"Here is a book that takes the real raw emotion of a mother, a wife, and a person and makes it an offering to help those that grieve." D. Leveille

$32.20

Hardcover

I fell in love with poetry and creative writing in grade school. Early on I loved to read, always checking out the maximum number of books I could from our local library. And, I think I was in seventh grade when it just hit me. I wanted to be a writer, and I never veered from that ambition throughout my school years.

In high school I studied journalism and wrote for the newspaper, and I studied journalism in college. I even was a member of a college journalism sorority. And after I graduated from college I did manage to get a job almost immediately working for a fashion trade magazine.

But since that didn’t last long and in my day, newspaper and magazine writing jobs for women were few and far between, I ended up working most of my professional life as a technical writer and editor, grant writer, and proposal manager in the aerospace industry. Instead of creative writing, I took creative detours into drawing and painting, sewing, quilting, and needlepoint.

However, I began to fulfill my dream to be a professional writer late in life. I started journaling, I took university classes in many different writing genres: fiction, poetry, personal essays, memoir, and I attended many writing workshops. I began to feel a part of a writing community from which I gained more and more confidence to put my work out in the world.

And I’m happy to say in the last fifteen years or so I’ve have several publishing successes: a nonfiction book, a memoir, two poetry anthologies, poet for two books of photography, and many of my poems have been published online and in print. Most recently I have had publishing success as a web journalist. At last, in my retirement years I’ve finally managed to fulfill my dream to become a journalist.

Now, writing is so ingrained in me that I must write every day – either a journal entry, a blog post, a poem, or work on my current book – a historical novel. My motto is it’s never too late to work at your dream career. Especially if it’s writing. I think I can do that for the rest of my life.