For those who want to know more about my credentials…
I grew up in an upper-middle class family with upper-middle class tastes in an Upper Midwest town, Wausau, Wisconsin. I knew my four grandparents and two great-grandparents. My parents moved away as my dad ascended in the ranks of Employers Insurance, and I went away to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.
My major was Journalism, with a minor in Art, but I started taking courses in creative writing (1955-58). Among other things, I learned I didn’t like chasing fire engines but loved writing personal essays, e.g., about the night an old, weather-beaten farmer, whom I had come to interview about his 19th century plow museum, pointed up at a swift-moving light in the cold, dark sky and declared we were witnessing the future. Sputnik.
Time passed. I married in 1959, had three wonderful children, lived in Racine, WI, Kirkwood, MO, Athens, GA, moved to Tucson and – divorced — finally earned my B.A. in English and Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. It was 1971, the same year my essay about how supermarket magazines try to scare women was published in The Nation, paying $75. I was asked to write on the same topic for New York Magazine, interviewing editors in that city. Well, I just couldn’t bring myself to abandon my children. Thus I took my first full-time job, Director of Community Relations at Tucson General Hospital.
In 1974, one of my UA professors asked me to teach her courses “Non-fiction 101” and “Non-fiction 201” while she was on sabbatical leave. Thinking I might continue teaching, I enrolled in the external MFA program at Goddard College, Vermont, assigned to mentors Richard Rhodes (later Pulitzer Prize winner for The Making of the Atomic Bomb; and Geoffrey Wolfe (novelist and Esquire magazine essayist). By the late 1970s, I observed that women creative writers seemed to be having nervous breakdowns, and male creative writers seemed to be having mistresses, so I switched directions again and worked intermittently as media specialist or program director for a series of public programs funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, beginning with “Health and Human Rights.”
From 1977 to 1982, I worked for the Tucson Public Library. While serving as Project Writer for the Learning Library Program “Sonoran Heritage,” which eventually earned the top honor awarded by the American Association for State and Local History, I earned the external M.A. in Education, St. Mary’s College, Winona, Minnesota, specializing in non-traditional teaching of local history. Now I could do a better job of developing programs and learning materials for adults. One result was Making Connections: A Family History Workbook, a version of which will be added to this website one day as “Tumbleweeds: A Moving Story.”
I was moved…
In 1980, Roger Dahood, a Professor of English Literature, took the brave step of marrying the mother of three nearly-grown children. In 1984, with all three in college, I accompanied him on a 20-month academic assignment to London. While Roger labored over medieval manuscripts, I did a great deal of research on utopias, including company towns. A visit to the Rowntree chocolate factory archives was particularly fulfilling, in more ways than one.
Upon our return, I started writing articles for local and regional magazines, usually about community building and neighborhoods, education, or visual arts. I had three multi-year contracts at the University – as information specialist at the art museum; arts and humanities program developer for Extended University (continuing education); and special assistant to the Dean of Extended University. Meanwhile, all my children became professional planners, one in housing, one in transportation, one in economic development.
I still had a lot to learn.
It was during the 1990s that our oldest family members were in decline. I enrolled in post-graduate short courses offered by the UA Gerontological Studies program, including “Elderlaw,” “Nursing Home Trends,” “Women and Aging,” and “Death and Dying.” Roger and I also became acquainted with Continuing Care Communities and Assisted Living. In 1998, his mother and my father both died. In 2001, we invited my emotionally fragile mother to live with us, using as backup caregiver companions, hired through Catalina In-home Services. “Lettie” died in 2005.
In the last decade before I retired, my professional focus was swayed by magazine assignments toward home design. I also wrote and edited (and still do) a newsletter for professional remodeler Greg Miedema, CGR, CGB, CAPS, CGP, and president of Dakota Builders. He was in the first class of Certified Aging-in-Place Specialists (CAPS), who know how to modify homes for the comfort and safety of elders. I was accepted by the Sonoran Institute Tucson Community Design Academy to take an intense, 12-week course that prepares 25 people each year to advocate for community development that is environmentally and socially sustainable, affordable, and beautiful. Then I spent a lot of time looking at how policymakers, planners and architects forget the needs of their oldest residents.
Sophie George’s perspectives expanded as I photographed medical buildings without clear number markings or visible entrances or elevators, and imagined myself at 80 trying to get to a doctor’s office. I thought about what a psychologist said: our tendency to wall our homes and gardens for privacy at mid-life isolates older women living alone. But my “oh-oh” moment came when I toured a highly rated Assisted Living/Alzheimer’s facility, and overheard the daughter of a distraught elderly man — who has just been found wandering unsupervised in the parking lot — impatiently explain that his “girl friend” had to be removed from her apartment next to his to go live with her family. Were the kids worried that he would marry her and change his will? Was she going to die soon? Did he sexually assault her? Did she graduate to the Alzheimer’s unit? Old people are very much alive!
I never had a “career ladder,” but I now saw my meandering path as a nonfiction writer had come to a broad foundation for the most important work of my life – to explore through Sophie’s perilous adventures the so-called Golden Years.
Over the last four decades, I have attended a few writers’ conferences and workshops, and occasionally asked an agent or editor to read a sample of the going “Sophie George” mystery. Usually my writing got praise, but the idea of an older woman sleuth (i.e., “not sexy”) in these times got raised eyebrows and doubtful looks. One editor insisted I had to learn more about “menace.”
Suddenly, I was 70. I had severe spinal stenosis and miserable guts from eight years of painkilling drugs. I opted for spinal fusion and now can sit on my rubber ball chair long enough to write and rewrite a story until it is as good as it will get without readers and critics. I decided I didn’t have time to go the traditional route and send my manuscripts out to agents and wait and wait for someone to wake up and smell the fear in the Boomer Generation.
Please browse the Moxie Cosmos website for pages that ask you to raise questions and comment on the issues of aging that are woven into what I hope you find to be “a good read” in SOPHIE REDESIGNED — and in five more “Sophie and Sam” mysteries to follow.
Karen Dahood
January, 2010