Update July 2026

So … I finished my quilt July 7, 2026.

My quilt completed July 7, 2026

It’s a quilt that I started in May of 2019. I was a whole different person then. My parents were alive. I’d just been promoted to full professor after winning their research award the semester before. I remember looking at the quilt stuff I had in front of me while I took a job interview that was clearly going nowhere. You can tell, by the way. HR forces search committees to interview people who match job descriptions. And no way were they going to hire a person who had just obtained Full professor for an Assistant Professor job. During that interview, I decided that’s it. I’m staying put. I picked up my scissors and began cutting triangles. The interview did not include video.

Anyway.

My first square was an homage to Dad’s side of the family. He grew up in Grifton, North Carolina and before my Aunt Mary Lee got to where she couldn’t, she invited us to Grifton to learn more about Dad’s side of the family. It was a whole thing. Grifton has an annual Shad festival and has a historical Indian village next to Contentea Creek [they call creeks rivers in coastal North Carolina, weird right?"]. There’s also stories of Blackbeard the pirate making it as far as Grifton from the intercoastal waterway. It wasn’t far from Grifton that the naturalist John Lawson was executed by Tuscarora Indians over a land dispute. He was going up the Neuse River at the time. John Lawson wrote A New Voyage to Carolina containing the exact description and natural history of that country; and a journal of a thousand miles, travel’d thro’ several nations of indians, given a particular account of their customs, manners, etc. It’s quite ironic that the man who was doing his best to open communications between peoples was ritualistically tortured and killed by members of one of the sides.

Grifton, NC square

And so I cut up a teeshirt I got while in Grifton and sewed it onto a section of red teeshirt I got from some educator’s conference held in Savannah, GA. Red was Dad’s favorite color. Given that it was of the Indian village, I surrounded it with fabric that had a Native American theme. It was a great release of pent up creative energy.

Creatives know what I mean. There’s a point where the dam bursts and you enter flow state. You lose track of time or even who you are.

The Grifton square was followed by two squares with a boat theme. One of my favorite squares features my Sunfish sailboat, Outrageous. When I was eleven or so, I was allowed to sail around wherever I wanted to in Lake Hartwell as long as I kept the shore of the sailing club in view and kept away from the dam. There were two islands in particular I loved going to: Mica Island and Sinking Island, and Friendly Island. These are names I gave them. Sinking Island was where I could find arrowheads and Mica Island had a lot of mica in large sheets.

Sunfish square

And somewhere in there was a freak hail storm that hit Northeastern North Carolina and Virginia. The hailstones were the size of softballs [and down the street the size of bowling balls] and in a short period of time, damaged our roof, several windows, and our poor cars. The front windshield of my Honda Fit was not fit for driving down the road, but that’s what we had to do in order for me to make it to the Southeastern Writer’s Association June conference. I had to go, I was president at the time. My husband drove fifty miles to SafeWay Auto Glass repair, his head out of the side window. Front window held together by tape.

Driving to SafeWay Auto Repair

I remember working on the quilt at Edisto Beach, South Carolina that July for what would be the last family beach trip that I had with my parents. By that time, I was working on squares that featured marine life in homage to the time I spent at the College of Charleston to get my M.S. in Marine Biology. Mom’s dementia was so bad, Dad packed them up the morning of our third day after a sleepless night with Mom screaming and hollering about wanting to go home. She didn’t mean their home in Pauline, SC. She meant HOME. An undefinable feeling of how it was when she was much younger.

Taken at Edisto Beach summer of 2019

The fall of 2019 went pretty well, but Covid-19 maligned the spring of 2020 beyond recognition. There was the professor I was before we weren’t allowed to return after Spring Break and there was the professor I had to become due to the duress of online teaching just to get to May graduation. Just when I was able to relax and return to my quilt project … I was working on the second snail square. Dad said my first snail square was his favorite. It was based on The Voyages of Dr. Doolittle. One of my all time favorite books. We were watching Ozark on Netflix when my phone rang. It was my sister who said, “I think Dad’s dead.” That was May 19, 2020 and Dad’s death set off a chain of crazy decisions we were forced to make. Just days before his death, Dad was fine. More than fine. He used his skills in engineering to record his tuba part to Semper Fidelis to play with the Spartanburg Community Band’s online tribute to America. He had used his tractor to cut the front yard [about 8 acres of grassland]. To say we were caught off guard is an understatement.

Dad with his tuba and tuba cart he designed Christmas 2019

Mom died early September 2020. We [me and my husband] decided to move to Pauline, SC in the house I helped build as a tween to help my sister with my parents’ estate. I taught online for a while, but left my professor job when they did away with online teaching. I did some adjunt teaching local to Pauline, but the pay was lousy to say the least. The last semester of adjunct teaching, I was experiencing adverse health issues. I did make it to SWA’s 2024 June conference. At this point, I was their contest director and registrar and had purchased with SWA monies some 50th anniversary mugs for folks to buy at the conference to give back to SWA. I just barely made it through that week. So much pain. So many trips to the bathroom. The doctor at St. Simon’s Island Urgent Care told me I needed to get a CT scan when I got home. And that summer, I was diagnosed with stage 4 bladder cancer.

Dad’s and Mom’s obituaries

And so I retired early.

That’s why I stopped writing blog posts. I needed to undergo treatment and had no idea how that was going to go. There were so many things that happened between July and October’s PET scan that showed a complete response to treatment [and I was able to keep my bladder!] and so many things that happened after. I shall concentrate on the good news that occurred that overlaps with writing.

• Not one, but two Silver Honorable Mentions from Writers of the Future. My running tally to date is: eight honorable mentions and two silver honorable mentions.

• Three leadership-related awards from SWA, including the Writers Helping Writers Hall of Fame. In part, this was due to my efforts of securing Wulf Moon for our 2025 SWA conference where he was one of the faculty as well as our keynote speaker.

• I was the recipient of Moon’s Wulfpack Writer’s scholarship to attend 2026’s LTUE conference. LTUE stands for Life, the Universe, and Everything and is held every February in Provo, Utah. It’s an amazing conference for speculative fiction writers. They also have stuff for speculative fiction artists. Orson Scott Card was there!

My two SHMs from WOTF

SWA 2025 with Wulf Moon as our keynote speaker

Taken at LTUE 2026 banquet

Needless to say, my quilt project was put on hold until recently. I was working on quilt square number 20 before I had taken the last break which I finished May 2026 and then sewed together the five rows, etc.

As I was working on the quilt, I found myself in conversation with my sewing mentors: Mama [Mom’s mom], Grandmama [Dad’s mom], and of course Mother [my mom]. Even though they are now dead, I was able to commune with them through my work on this quilt. And now that the quilt is complete, I remember how things were throughout my life and how I was shaped by family and friends and my career path. It’s comforting having this quilt to record fond memories.

Yesterday, I covered myself up in the quilt and felt the textures of the squares and it was like being hugged by all of my favorite people from my past.

My next project will involve writing. It was a nice break, but back to it.