Articles

A little slice-of-life essay put her on track

Breakthrough: A writer's success story
By Barbara Weddle
Published: April 6, 2010
I began dabbling at writing when I was in my early 40s, but as a single mother working night shift in a factory, I couldn’t write in any meaningful way until my four sons were grown and away from home. By then I was 50 and had begun writing seriously —usually small slice-of-life essays about my childhood in rural Ohio.

However, when I finished my first essay, “Caboose,” I shelved it for more than a year. No one, I felt, would want to read about a young girl watching a train (more specifically, a caboose) weaving its way across an Ohio landscape.
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