Where Do My Ideas Come From

Synchronicity (While Earth Still Speaks)

Synchronicity: “the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection” (Oxford Languages)

Twenty-seven years ago, in a narrow column of The Chicago Tribune, I read that the Virgin Mary had stopped visiting a farm at Conyers, Georgia. (Really.) Until then, as many as 80,000 pilgrims would gather to hear Mary’s messages. The farm owner’s name? Nancy. Nancy Fowler (https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-
culture/conyers-apparitions-of-the-virgin-mary/)

How did Nancy Fowler feel about Mary’s abandoning her, I wondered. What would Nancy do now that she was irrelevant? What was Mary’s next project? I clipped the article out of the newspaper and tucked it in my journal.

Several years later I got to thinking about how I might leave the world a better, safer place for my grandchildren. Might the time come when I would be called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice? What cause would warrant such a cost? The environment, I decided.

I started to write. Mary, more crone than virgin, wants women to organize to save the environment. She makes regular appearances at Elizabeth’s North Carolina farm. Elizabeth’s young adult daughter, taking on Mary’s mission as her own, becomes an eco-terrorist. 

Recent political events leave me again thinking, might there come the time, sooner rather than later, when I will be required to sacrifice my life for a cause?

Genealogy (Leander’s Lies)

As long as she lived, my mother-in-law believed that her father had represented North Carolina in the U.S. Congress and hunted with Teddy Roosevelt in the Dismal Swamp.

She believed that his first wife and only daughter had died. In truth, when he married my husband’s grandmother in Missouri, he had two living wives and five children back in North Carolina.

When genealogical research revealed his many lies, I recognized a compelling story. My non-fiction essay, “Leander’s Lies,” won the 2018 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize, sponsored by the North Carolina Literary Review. But WHY did he lie, I kept wondering. For possible answers, I turned to late-nineteenth-century history. Might he have been a somewhat sympathetic character striving for escape and recognition?