How a Near-Death Experience Jumpstarted My Memoir by Julie Lomoe
Posted by Kathleen Pooler/@kathypooler with Julie Lomoe/@julielomoe
“How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flown. How did it get so late so soon?” ~ Dr. Seuss
Photo Credit: Free Google Image :”Book with flowers”
I am happy to introduce you to my writing colleague, novelist, poet and workshop leader Julie Lomoe who will share her writing journey with us as she begins to write her memoir. Julie and I work together in a local woman’s writing group.
Welcome, Julie!
Author, Poet, Writing Workshop Leader Julie Lomoe
How A Near-Death Experience Jumpstarted My Memoir
There’s nothing like a near-death experience to bring home the realization that it’s high time to get to work on that memoir you’ve been procrastinating about for ages. My own epiphany came about when I emerged from emergency brain surgery the day before Halloween. I’d been laid low by a subdural hematoma on October 29th—ironically, the same type of trauma that killed my mother in 1970.
Hers was more acutely traumatic than mine. At age 61, she was just coming into her own as an account executive at a Milwaukee advertising firm, building on all the expertise and the wide network of contacts she’d gained as an unpaid volunteer while playing out the role of good wife as my father rose to prominence as the editor of The Milwaukee Journal.
But a heart attack forced my father into early retirement, and his doctors persuaded him to escape the brutal Wisconsin winters by spending a few months in Florida. So she took a leave of absence, and one April night, she took a header onto the bathroom floor in the house they’d rented in Sarasota. She was comatose for weeks. Then, against all odds, she regained consciousness, but her brilliant mind had been radically damaged, and she died that November.
My own subdural hematoma was kinder and gentler—a slow bleed following a fall I must have taken while pruning the lower limbs of some young maples while sipping gin and tonic in my garden in mid-September. I awoke the next morning with a black eye, bruising and pain in my temple, but a doctor checked me out and told me it wasn’t serious. How wrong he was.
Six weeks later, recovering in the neurosurgical intensive care unit, my skull cobbled together with eighteen staples, I decided the time had finally come to get to work on a memoir. At 77, I’d had my closest brush ever with death, and I had no memory of the fall that precipitated my medical crisis. Could alcohol have played a role? I hadn’t been drunk, but it’s possible the gin and tonics threw me a bit off balance, and that I tripped over one of the irregular blue stone pavers in my shade garden.
Julie and Viola Lomoe at jazz festival in Milwaukee
Could my mother’s fatal fall have been alcohol related as well? It’s quite possible, since my parents loved their dry martinis, but I hadn’t dwelt on the subject until my own subdural hematoma conjured up the eerie parallels to my mother. Another parallel was her love of writing. In my earliest memories, I’m sitting on the floor beneath her desk, scribbling on yellow typing paper while she taps out short stories on a Smith Corona typewriter. As I later learned, she sent them off to The New Yorker, but received only rejection slips in reply. Eventually she gave up trying. At some point she threw them all away, and she never mentioned them again.
My father was an aspiring writer too. As a young man in the 1920’s, he rode the rails and lived in hobo jungles, accumulating material for what he hoped would become The Great American Novel, but when he became a journalist and rose through the ranks from reporter to Executive Editor, he abandoned his dreams of literary glory. Like my mother, he destroyed all evidence of his attempts at fiction.
How I would love to read what they wrote in their younger years. Alas, like me, they were both ruthless critics of their own creative efforts. They measured success in terms of acceptance by first-rank publishers of books and magazines. If they failed to scale those lofty heights, they saw no point in saving their work for posterity, if only for their own family.
Thanks to modern publishing technology, things are different today. I’ve written five novels and published three of them. I tried going the traditional route, querying agents and editors, even landed a leading agent in New York, but she didn’t sell my work. I hated rejection, so I gave up far too soon. Instead, I opted for the self-publishing route, so I have the pride and pleasure of holding my very own professionally published books in my hands, selling them locally or on Amazon. Sales have been fair, but my marketing efforts have been minimal, so there’s always room for improvement. As with the title of my soap opera vampire novel, Hope Dawns Eternal.
Unlike my parents, I intend to leave plenty of writing behind me when I go, if only for my daughter and grandchildren. And that leads back full-circle to my memoir. I began on my laptop the day after I was discharged from the ICU to a rehab center in Schenectady. At first I was delighted with the idea of being pampered, with my very own private room, all my needs met while I immersed myself in my writing—my very own writer’s retreat, subsidized by Medicare. I soon found out things didn’t quite work that way. I was poked and prodded, with nurses checking my vitals at all hours, and unrelentingly cheerful physical and occupational therapists urging me to get moving. But I got a decent start. I was home before Thanksgiving, and I’m plugging away at the book project I’m convinced will be my best yet
Subdural is evolving into a blend of prose and poetry, a collage of sorts, with a focus on my near-death experience of recent months and flashbacks to crucial life experiences that led me to the present day, focusing especially on memories of my mother, who died far too young. I’ve already outlived her by sixteen years, and I’m hoping for a couple of decades to go.
Julie Lomoe at poetry reding
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About the Author:
Julie Lomoe is a novelist, poet and painter. She is currently working on a memoir in prose and poetry, focusing on her recent near-death experience with a subdural hematoma and her relationship with her mother, an aspiring but unfulfilled writer who died from the same cause. She has published three novels of suspense: Mood Swing: The Bipolar Murders, Eldercide and Hope Dawns Eternal. All are available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats.
Julie is founder and director of Creative Crone Press. In 2018 she trademarked the words “Creative Crone,” and her plans include forming a Creative Crone Community and offering merchandise on her Creative Crone website, where she blogs regularly. She offers workshops on writing, creativity, women’s issues and aging.
Julie received an MFA in painting from Columbia University and has exhibited widely, most notably at the Museum of Modern Art and the 1969 Woodstock Festival. This year, with the fiftieth anniversary of the festival, she plans to exhibit her work from that period more widely.
Visit Julie Lomoe’s website at www.creativecrone.net, and subscribe in order to keep up with her latest news and offerings.
Contact Julie Lomoe at julielomoe@gmail.com or at:
Creative Crone Press, P.O. Box 363, Wynantskill, NY 12198.
Author Contact Information:
Website: The Creative Crone
Facebook: Julie Lomoe
Twitter: @julielomoe
Amazon Author Page
Author of three mystery novels, Eldercide, Mood Swing and Hope Dawns Eternal.
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Thank you, Julie, for sharing your thoughts on writing and publishing. And welcome to the memoir world. You have already defined a clear structure, and a title. Wishing you much joy on the journey! May you continue to experience healing and good health.
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How about you? Do you have a memoir in you just waiting to be released? What is holding you back?
I’d love to hear from you. Please join in the conversation below~
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Next Week:
Monday, 1/21/19:
“The Scents of Winter: A Memoir Moment”
