For as long as I can remember, reading was my passion and writing was my dream. “Someday, I’m going to write a book,” I would tell anyone who would listen when I was young.
Unfortunately, my parents didn’t share my vision. “You are not going to be a starving writer in an attic,” my father said, wagging a forefinger in my face. “You have to be able to make a living.”
I loved my father fiercely and wanted to please him, so I followed his instructions and earned a Bachelor’s degree in magazine journalism from the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University.
My first journalism job was as a newswriter and editor at an all-news radio station in Boston. It quickly became clear that a budding journalist didn’t earn much more than a starving writer in an attic, although I did have good benefits.
Under the station’s deadline-a-minute pace, I honed my skills and learned to fill the broadcasts with colorful prose. The hours were crazy, and the work was intense, but I loved every minute of it.
When my family began to grow, I found the demands of the newsroom felt incompatible with parenting as I needed to do it. I refocused my career on the more predictable field of public relations and business communications. Creating press releases, brochures and other materials for businesses and non-profit organizations allowed me to keep writing, even if I wasn’t writing a book.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and I found myself holed up at home with little to do and nowhere to go. I sat down at the keyboard and began writing a story for my young grandchildren about two best friends who loved celebrating Hanukkah together. I shared my story with some family and friends and to my surprise, they loved it. One friend in particular urged me to send it to a publisher. I took a chance and sent it to Kar-Ben.
When I received an email from Kar-Ben’s then-publisher Joni Sussman informing me they wanted to publish my book, I was stunned. “This must be spam,” I told my husband. Subsequent emails between us proved it was not.
My book, Charley and Seymour’s Hanukkah Miracle, will be published by Kar-Ben this fall. When you see it on the shelf it looks like a book, but to me it is a lifelong dream come true.