Writing Saga # 28 / An Unpublished New Author . . .

A Brief Profile

   I don’t know that I have anything by which to commend myself....other than by a few interesting Welsh ancestors of my father's family, from the old, coal mining district of the Rhondda Valleys of South Wales. But I was born and raised in Cardiff of a Welsh father and an English mother; and after a number of years in a small private girl's school, was eventually educated to tertiary level; much to my surprise. 

   After a disastrous two years in a technical college in Cardiff, studying hotel & catering management, a crazy subject, (for me, anyway,) for which I had no affinity, whatsoever. (My mother just signed me up for it; not knowing what else to do with me; thinking, well, at least, it would teach me how to be a good wife one day and manage a household! (I believe I didn't know how to boil an egg; nor what to do with a dishcloth.)) I passed the diploma, but hated it; and happily failed all the job interviews my long-suffering parents took me to. Later, despairing of me, they sent me away to England.

    (One example of how 'well suited' I was to 'catering:' Asked to do a term project in my final year I handed in an elaborate, hand-drawn sketchbook of the history and development of medieval costume!)

   In England I spent a year at the elite London College of Secretaries, Portland Place, London. Again not studying anything for which I was suited, but which did give me the necessary skill of being able to touch type: for I only ever wanted to be a writer. As to my being employed as a secretary, when I finished, I failed every interview, and embarrassed my dear father, who had obviously made a very poor investment in my very expensive education. 

   I was a dreamer; and the only education, that ever did anything to me, was invisible; just life; and after a family tragedy, my mother’s suicide, ‘I ran away to sea,’ and educated myself in it.  

  I lived for five years in small boats on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean; and had many adventures... colourful, terrifying, and altogether dramatic... which must have suited me, for I wrote screeds; and along the way gave birth to two beautiful children. 

   Now, years later, I live in the Far North of New Zealand, and I am happily married with six children, all a joy to me. Four, I homeschooled, two are still at home; one a young professional artist working from her studio in the garden; the other in his last year of homeschooling with dreams of inventing alternative systems for generating electrical power and of sailing around the world.  

     I have written copiously and thrown away copiously, always editing closely, and I am left with ten unpublished books. I have never sought publication before; I always wanted to finish what I felt I needed to write first. I have suffered much and have had a few breakdowns along the way, for which I am extremely grateful. There was my resource pool and my education for the things of which I was born to write.

I have discovered that it’s not those things I wanted to know that helped me the most, and revealed what I was after, but those I didn’t want to know and which I turned from; the real treasure was where I hadn’t looked for it before.

                                                          

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Please feel free to contact me . . . via email . . . my email address is:  judithdeverell@hotmail.com     I look forward to hearing from you.

Judith M. Evans Deverell,

Northland
NEW ZEALAND