About Me

This is Len and me. We think of ourselves as young adults with surprisingly clear memories of the 50’s and 60’s. 

I write this website. Len built and maintains it via Drupal (computer language). This means this website is not hosted by a commercial blog host nor do we never share or sell our subscriber address list. It also means Len is a nerd. 

I’ve been writing most of my adult life. My first published essay, ‘Peace Makers’ Freedom Train’ was in The Other Side in 1984. https://www.marybethdanielson.com/content/peace-makers-freedom-train-1984 I was published in many places through the years. Sometimes I repost old stuff in this website under Back in the Stacks.

‘Lost in Racine’ was my Racine Journal Times weekly column for twelve years. 

Becoming Esther is YA novel available at https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&fi...)

I grew up in a conservative Christian home in rural Michigan. Trying to figure out the difference between religion and faith pulled me to Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in the late 1970’s. (It’s the graduate school of religion at Northwestern in Evanston, IL). I did not become a minister. I did figure out how to breath. I also met Len who was NOT attending seminary. 

On our first date Len and I went to see the play Elephant Man. We talked for hours afterwards and here we still are still talking. 

He started his career as an advertising copywriter (he wrote McDonald’s Happy Meals!). He would work decades in direct and digital marketing. For ten of those years he co-owned an ad agency which was a mighty adventure. Len loves literature, science, computers, and me. 

We lived in Chicago twenty years and then moved to Racine where for the next twenty years. In 2015 Len and I moved to a small 100-year-old house near downtown Waukesha. What, you didn’t want to retire to a post-industrial city in the upper Midwest? We belong to a Unitarian Universalist congregation. 

We raised three great kids who are now awesome adults with lives and families of their own. We are ridiculously proud of them although I don’t write about them. Much. 

In our lives we’ve met amazing and horrible people, experienced grand and awful adventures. There’s so much to watch, think about, and say. Social action introduced us to people and places we couldn’t have met any other way. One of the privileges of my life was to serve on the board of Maya Works, a Mayan/North American Fair Trade organization. For ten years I worked in the Racine County Jail helping incarcerated inmates get jobs. 

These days I am working more intentionally at writing short fiction and my stories are at my Substack account. https://substack.com/@marybethdanielsonstories I tend to write most about older people, usually women, who are still figuring out their lives.  ‘How Crow Got Out of Jail’ won 2023 First Prize Wisconsin Writers’ Association. https://substack.com/home/post/p-138500721

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Welcome.