Mary Beth Writes

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Mary Beth and her husband

This is me, and my husband Len, in our office.

“If growing up is the process of creating ideas and dreams about what life should be, then maturity is letting go again.” Hey, I wrote that!

I have been writing most of my life; my first published essay, “Peace Makers’ Freedom Train” was in The Other Side in 1984. These are some of the places my writing has appeared: The Other Side, The Chicago Tribune, Reinventing Home (a book of essays written with 5 other women), “Lost in Racine” – 10 years writing a weekly column in the Racine Journal Times, The Less is More Gazette, EntreMundos, Becoming Esther (a YA novel available as an eBook at https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&fi...), and a few more places I can’t remember.

Len and I went on our first date in 1980 and we’ve been ‘happily-ever-after-ing’ ever since. He started his professional career as an advertising copywriter (he wrote McDonald’s Happy Meals!). The past two decades he’s worked in digital marketing. He constructed this website by himself and it’s why there are no ads except for the ones you guys buy. Len loves literature, science, computers, and me. 

I grew up in a conservative Christian home in rural Michigan. Len and I met in Chicago and then lived there for 20 years. When our kids were youngsters we moved to Racine where we would live the next 20 years. Just a couple years ago Len and I moved to a small house near downtown Waukesha. What, you didn’t want to retire to a post-industrial city in the upper Midwest? Anyways, we belong to a Unitarian-Universalist congregation now. There are many stories of how we got from There to Here…

We raised three great kids who are adults with lives and families of their own now. We are ridiculously proud of them although I do my best to keep their particulars out of this website. Privacy is one of the best gifts I can still give them.

We’ve met amazing people and experienced grand escapades in our life. Frugality has been our side-kick how-to-live-well strategy for nearly 40 years. Social action has carried us on its wide back to people and places we couldn’t have dreamed of meeting any other way. Retirement is our next adventure as we invent what we want to do now and next.

Welcome!

Dear Friends

September 14, 2017

Zounds and Zowie! Here’s my new website!  It’s taken way too many months and an astounding amount of eye-and-brain-numbing work on Len’s part -- but here it is!

I’m so happy to be finally here. There will, of course, be snafus along the way, but we’ll get it figured out.