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Group A Stories October 2020

Stories for the Fall 2020 Feedback Sessions

Group A

To avoid emailing stories back and forth, please upload on this page the story you wish to discuss this month.

Post your stories a minimum of one week in advance of the feedback session. Those seven days give you and your buddies time to read and provide helpful feedback on each others’ stories.

Instructions:

  1. Share your story in the comments section on this page. You can either copy and paste the text of your story in the comment box or click the paperclip icon to attach a PDF of your work. Note: it must be a PDF; Word documents are not accepted on the comment app.
  2. Print a copy of the Story Review Form (below) for each story your buddies share here.
  3. Read each story a couple of times.
  4. Complete the Story Review Form after your readings to organize your thoughts, suggestions, and questions.
  5. During the live Feedback meeting, you will share with your buddy what you wrote on the form, as well as anything new upon hearing their story read aloud.
  6. Email a copy of your completed Story Review Form to each buddy so they can keep a record of comments and suggestions related to their story.

If there are specific questions you’d like answered, or if you want your buddies to concentrate more heavily on a certain story device, e.g., dialogue, opening, title, etc., please include those requests in the comments when you attach your story. Ask for what you need to help you make your story the best it can be.

The Feedback Guidelines are available below to provide the framework of how Life Writers approaches giving and receiving feedback on written work, both via posts on the website and during feedback sessions.

Feedback Sessions

10/27 @ 6pm EDT

11/17 @ 6pm EDT

12/29 @ 6pm EDT

Need help with how to give and receive feedback?

If you’re new to giving and receiving feedback on written work, or you’d like a refresher, watch our video tutorial for a better understanding of the process.

33 Comments

  • Deborah Hunt Repp
    Posted November 12, 2020 at 11:23 am

    This is a very short story in my series of vignettes which will be making up segments of my memoires. I’ll try to post this to practice. I would appreciate comments. I do plan to expand and add to the complexity of this story. I looks like the pdf is attached.–Success! Deborah

    • Norma Beasley
      Posted November 15, 2020 at 11:19 am

      Debbie, wonderful descriptions, delightful presentation…I enjoyed your story immensely! I’m still not sure I understand the famous phrase…”That we have.” What does it mean?

    • Ada Miller
      Posted November 17, 2020 at 12:19 pm

      Love the story. Suggestions: they blossom TO; she wore….black pumps. Her spindly….waist over which she wore…..; she showed a flip side of her personality.; episode description is excellent, I can visualize the whole thing. After pivot right. Put in the great sentence “her stomping scared…” finish paragraph is very good. I liked it and think this reads better.

  • Deborah Hunt Repp
    Posted November 17, 2020 at 3:49 pm

    This beginning page regards my early career, leading up to a 25-year career in NYC business as a secretary.

  • Ada Miller
    Posted November 17, 2020 at 4:24 pm

    I have lived in Orlando, Florida my entire life with the exception of the WWII years. Born in Orlando April 28, 1940, the life of every citizen was about to change. One of my most memorable pictures is my one year old picture, running with arms outstretched. We were living at 548 Lake Street and had a fish pond in our back yard. Aunt Jo and Uncle Wiley lived next door with my grandfather Jack Robbins. December 6, 1941 changed our lives when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the USA entered the war on two fronts, Europe and Asia. My father could not enlist due to serious kidney illness. He sold insurance at the time for Mutual of Omaha and began travels to Atlanta, Savanah, and Beaufort, S. Carolina. A first memory is riding in a stroller in Atlanta, on a side walk with a wall next to the sidewalk. Cecil is pushing the stroller. That is all I remember about Atlanta, but next we moved to Savanah, Ga. where there was a large army base for training. My father’s brother Sylvester and Aunt Sybil had secured a house in a very tight rental market and we moved in. Many memories of this home. My tricycle was stolen off the front porch, older boys made a ride using an eight foot board with skates attached underneath and back braces nailed on somehow. Three or four of us could sit on the board and someone pushed from behind. Have no idea how it was steered but I remember the fun of riding down the street. Another memory is rolling a jar of cream on the floor between Aunt Sybil and I to make butter. Last December at Sybil’s 100 th birthday party, I told that story. In a few months, we moved the short distance to Beaufort where there was a huge marine base, Parris Island. The home we lived in was on the Main Street into downtown and on a bluff overlooking the river. Many memories abound from these years. One day a pretty young woman knocked on the door and asked mother if she had a vacant bedroom to rent. This was Marie and her young husband Dale was a dentist and assigned to Paris Island. There was no place for them to rent and they wanted to be together. They moved in. Not long after, another couple rented the only other vacant bedroom. Then Izzy and ? Moved into the basement. I can remember the cute curtains she made for the little basement windows and the hams my father had bought from farmers out in the country hanging from the ceiling. Can’t remember where the bed was. These were war years with rations and scarcity. Lots of tomatoes were grown around Beaufort and there was a cannery attached to high school property. I went with mother and we canned a lot of tomatoes and brought them home. When I was four, I had pneumonia. This was a fatal
    disease at the time and I was a frail child from stories told. Taken to the hospital my parents were told there was only a slim chance of survival. They offered the only hope and that was a new drug being tried, penicillin! It had been tried on the troops with good success. It was given to me and I lived. I had been in an oxygen tent and all that. Memorabilia from this time is a small China piggy bank given to me for my forth birthday. One night, our home dwellers had a large party and they asked me to bring them my bank which they passed around and filled with change. I was so happy that I entertained by singing a song or two. I was always singing, so my father nicknamed me Sing Song for a character in Dick Tracy comic strip. I was five years old in April 1945 and the war ended in Europe. We moved back to Orlando and I started first grade. Do not remember kindergarten so think I never attended.

  • Deborah Hunt Repp
    Posted January 15, 2021 at 3:09 pm

    My parents were horrified that their sweet, young girl would move in with a man. That just was not done in Iowa! They flew to Boston to meet this man. At an awkward dinner meeting at the Sheraton Plaza hotel’s formal gold and cream-colored dining room, Dartmouth Farmer Charlie and Diminutive Louise held their own as Rick tried to schmooze them into believing that he only had my best interests at heart. They didn’t buy it. But 2 years later when he had married me, he was accepted reluctantly by the family.My parents were horrified that their sweet, young girl would move in with a man. That just was not done in Iowa! They flew to Boston to meet this man. At an awkward dinner meeting at the Sheraton Plaza hotel’s formal gold and cream-colored dining room, Dartmouth Farmer Charlie and Diminutive Louise held their own as Rick tried to schmooze them into believing that he only had my best interests at heart. They didn’t buy it. But 2 years later when he had married me, he was accepted reluctantly by the family. My parents were horrified that their sweet, young girl would move in with a man. That just was not done in Iowa! They flew to Boston to meet this man. At an awkward dinner meeting at the Sheraton Plaza hotel’s formal gold and cream-colored dining room, Dartmouth Farmer Charlie and Diminutive Louise held their own as Rick tried to schmooze them into believing that he only had my best interests at heart. They didn’t buy it. But 2 years later when he had married me, he was accepted reluctantly by the family.

    • Ada Miller
      Posted January 23, 2021 at 12:25 pm

      Am sure you have noticed that your stor y repeated three times. Such is tech and Word computing. I do like what you are telling and anxious to read more. Want to hear about Rick.

      • Deborah Hunt Repp
        Posted January 24, 2021 at 9:38 am

        Thanks Ada. It is a process each day on the computer and I’m learning. Rick was a scoundrel!

  • Deborah Hunt Repp
    Posted January 15, 2021 at 3:28 pm

    https://writingyourlife.org/lw-group-a-stories-oct-2020/#comment-30065

    The Shoes 

     
    In the 1970s I was a naive junior secretary. My parents suggested that secretarial work was suitable for young woman like me who received average grades had limited high school science and math background.  I acquiesced to their suggestion. I recognized I was a frivolous 16/17-year-old, with a carefree attitude. I just wanted to flee the Iowa home nest. Women doctors, professors, engineers or lawyers were few. Women directly out of college or high school did not aspire to advanced degrees. They usually became nurses, teachers, or secretaries.  I needed to fit in. Women in the 1960s had not yet paved their way into the boardroom.

        When I was dreaming at age 14-16 about my future, I recall that I wanted to work as a secretary to the smartest, richest, businessman in the country. My idea was a bit flaky, broad and unfocused, but I did narrow the idea down to wanting to work in a major city for a company, not a government entity.

    My mother had attended a small women’s 2-year college in Missouri in 1940.  My parents thought I would be protected there. I knew instinctively they meant safe from boys/men. In hindsight I believe it was a sensible and correct suggestion on their part.

    After the two years, I graduated with an Associates in Arts Degree. My parents and I implemented their next recommendation: a European summer trip with the college arts instructor and about 25 other giggling female graduates/idiots who toured 8 European countries in 22 days. The world was a kinder and gentler place back then. I believe the most outrageous thing that happened to us was when as we left the Vatican tour and jumped on a crowded Rome bus, a young priest pinched Sally M. on her tempting, young derriere.

    After that world-wind trip, I trained at Boston’s Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School for one year.  Upon completion, I had decided to work in Boston. Upon completion, my mother made a special trip to the city to help me find an apartment. Her visit reassured me that I was truly on my own. She was with me for a couple of days in Boston to get me settled.  We shopped at Filene’s for new working wardrobe for me and bedding, pillows, curtains, kitchen set-up and the like. But in several months, I learned a hard lesson, which is: that a single woman never rents or lives in a basement apartment in a city. 

    I accepted a $125 weekly salary secretarial job working for a Partner with leading money management executive.  The firm was one of Boston’s oldest, elite, and most successful companies.  My first boss was a 32-year-old gentleman, naturally a Harvard graduate.  He was kind, understanding, and a good teacher.  I must have shown some promise or aptitude for business/finance, as he asked if I would like to learn how to read and understand a balance sheet.  I eagerly agreed. His teaching and faith in me regarding that one small accounting exposure, helped me to gain the courage to better myself. 

                   
    My career in Boston was a stepping-stone to adulthood. I always look back fondly on my years there: wandering around and people watching from a bench in the Boston Commons and Public Gardens, Faneuil Hall, The Freedom Trail, Back Bay antique shops, the Boston Library, tea at the Ritz Carleton, and especially the trendy boutiques on Boylston and Newbury Streets. It is a beautiful City, then and now. There I discovered there was an alternative to plain, midwestern old-lady underwear and clothing!  I planned fun trips to Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and The Cape on weekends with girlfriends. I loved the vegetable market shopping in Haymarket Square for weekend treats.   The City just oozed history and I lapped it up. On Saturdays I would go to the Isabella Stewart Gardner house and museum. Describe this place.

    _________________________________________________________________
    After working about 2 years, I met a very suave English stockbroker who lived in New York City. Over a two-week period, he swept me off my feet: flowers (red roses) delivered to my desk; cocktails (two Manhattan’s —a new drink for me!); a tipsy dinner at the famous fish restaurant Anthony’s Pier Four; and an offer to spend the weekend in New York City at his place. 

    After this brief courtship, I told my parents I was moving to New York with him.  My parents were horrified that their sweet, young girl would move in with a man. That just was not done in Iowa! They flew to Boston to meet this man. At an awkward dinner meeting at the Sheraton Plaza hotel’s formal gold and cream-colored dining room, Dartmouth Farmer Charlie and Diminutive Louise held their own as Rick tried to schmooze them into believing that he only had my best interests at heart. They didn’t buy it. But 2 years later when he had married me, he was accepted reluctantly by the family.

    My mother cried when she told her Original Bridge Club ladies back in Iowa that Debbie had succumbed to an older, divorced, Englishman. Horrors! Rick then packed me up and drove me to his high-rise pad overlooking Central Park and New York City.  And so, I began my love affair with husband # 1 and New York City.

             The stockbroker was my ticket to New York City. I was in love with Rick and he was the answer to my dilemma of the moment in Boston: a Back Bay stalker who was throwing bricks through my basement windows because I had dumped him, calling my workplace, and following me in his car as I walked home.  I leapt at Rick’s offer to move in with him in New York City.

    ______________________________________________________

  • Deborah Hunt Repp
    Posted January 16, 2021 at 4:30 pm

    Deborah Hunt Repp
    Vignette Business Career Jobs                                                                                                                

    The Shoes 

     
    In the 1970s I was a naive junior secretary. My parents suggested that secretarial work was suitable for young woman like me who received average grades had limited high school science and math background.  I acquiesced to their suggestion. I recognized I was a frivolous 16/17-year-old, with a carefree attitude. I just wanted to flee the Iowa home nest. Women doctors, professors, engineers or lawyers were few. Women directly out of college or high school did not aspire to advanced degrees. They usually became nurses, teachers, or secretaries.  I needed to fit in. Women in the 1960s had not yet paved their way into the boardroom.
               When I was dreaming at age 14-16 about my future, I recall that I wanted to work as a secretary to the smartest, richest, businessman in the country. My idea was a bit flaky, broad and unfocused, but I did narrow the idea down to wanting to work in a major city for a company, not a government entity.
    My mother had attended a small women’s 2-year college in Missouri in 1940.  My parents thought I would be protected there. I knew instinctively they meant safe from boys/men. In hindsight I believe it was a sensible and correct suggestion on their part.
    After the two years, I graduated with an Associates in Arts Degree. My parents and I implemented their next recommendation: a European summer trip with the college arts instructor and about 25 other giggling female graduates/idiots who toured 8 European countries in 22 days. The world was a kinder and gentler place back then. I believe the most outrageous thing that happened to us was when as we left the Vatican tour and jumped on a crowded Rome bus, a young priest pinched Sally M. on her tempting, young derriere.

    After that world-wind trip, I trained at Boston’s Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School for one year.  Upon completion, I had decided to work in Boston. Upon completion, my mother made a special trip to the city to help me find an apartment. Her visit reassured me that I was truly on my own. She was with me for a couple of days in Boston to get me settled.  We shopped at Filene’s for new working wardrobe for me and bedding, pillows, curtains, kitchen set-up and the like. But in several months, I learned a hard lesson, which is: that a single woman never rents or lives in a basement apartment in a city. 

    I accepted a $125 weekly salary secretarial job working for a Partner with leading money management executive.  The firm was one of Boston’s oldest, elite, and most successful companies.  My first boss was a 32-year-old gentleman, naturally a Harvard graduate.  He was kind, understanding, and a good teacher.  I must have shown some promise or aptitude for business/finance, as he asked if I would like to learn how to read and understand a balance sheet.  I eagerly agreed. His teaching and faith in me regarding that one small accounting exposure, helped me to gain the courage to better myself. 

               
    My career in Boston was a stepping-stone to adulthood. I always look back fondly on my years there: wandering around and people watching from a bench in the Boston Commons and Public Gardens, Faneuil Hall, The Freedom Trail, Back Bay antique shops, the Boston Library, tea at the Ritz Carleton, and especially the trendy boutiques on Boylston and Newbury Streets. It is a beautiful City, then and now. There I discovered there was an alternative to plain, midwestern old-lady underwear and clothing!  I planned fun trips to Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and The Cape on weekends with girlfriends. I loved the vegetable market shopping in Haymarket Square for weekend treats.   The City just oozed history and I lapped it up. On Saturdays I would go to the Isabella Stewart Gardner house and museum. Describe this place.

    _________________________________________________________________
    After working about 2 years, I met a very suave English stockbroker who lived in New York City. Over a two-week period, he swept me off my feet: flowers (red roses) delivered to my desk; afterwork cocktails (two Manhattan’s —a new drink for me!); a tipsy dinner at the famous fish restaurant Anthony’s Pier Four; and an offer to spend the weekend in New York City at his place. After this brief courtship, I told my parents I was moving to New York with him.  My parents were horrified that their sweet, young girl would move in with a man. That just was not done in Iowa! They flew to Boston to meet this man. At an awkward dinner meeting at the Sheraton Plaza hotel’s formal gold and cream-colored dining room, Dartmouth Farmer Charlie and Diminutive Louise held their own as Rick tried to schmooze them into believing that he only had my best interests at heart. They didn’t buy it. But 2 years later when he had married me, he was accepted reluctantly by the family.
    My mother cried when she told her Original Bridge Club ladies that Debbie had succumbed to an older, divorced, Englishman. Horrors! Rick packed me up and drove me to his high-rise pad overlooking Central Park and New York City.  And so, I began my love affair with husband # 1 and New York City.

               The stockbroker was my ticket to New York City. I was in love with Rick and he was the answer to my dilemma of the moment in Boston: a Back Bay stalker who was throwing bricks through my basement windows because I had dumped him, calling my workplace, and following me in his car as I walked home.  I leapt at Rick’s offer to move in with him in New York City. 

    • Ada Miller
      Posted January 23, 2021 at 12:31 pm

      I love this story. If it was a book I would keep turning pages.

  • Ada Miller
    Posted January 16, 2021 at 9:04 pm

    here is my story

    • Deborah Hunt Repp
      Posted January 24, 2021 at 9:47 am

      Your words about turpentine made me want to learn more. What a tract of land back then. The Swan — wonderful name. Keep on writing. Debbie

  • Deborah Hunt Repp
    Posted January 24, 2021 at 4:50 pm

    SNICKLES AND SASSY GO ON AN ADVENTURE

               Snickles was a little 4-month-old, special designer kitten. He was born in Texas at a breeder who specialized in breeding Ragamuffin cats. One can only assume that he was the runt of the litter because he was very tiny, with long sparse brownish fur.   He was a timid kitten. Nevertheless, he boarded a plane at the Dallas airport in Texas. Snickles, who had not been named yet, had been placed inside a strong brown carrier which the airline promised to handle with expert care. He did not know it at the time, but he was on his way to Orlando Florida to meet his new owner. When he arrived in Orlando, unbeknownst to him he was met at the airport by 2 kind souls. One was an English lady, was a great cat-lover and who was tiny just like he was.  She had a pixie face framed with spiky gold hair whisps which was the current fashion rage. The second person was the lady’s good friend, Michael, an older gentleman teacher of world history.  

               Sassy was a 3-year-old beautiful long hair white Ragamuffin cat with peach, gray and beige splashes under her luxurious coat of thick white fur. Sassy belonged to an elite class of designer breeds just like Snickles. She lived in Palm Beach, Florida and was cared for by a funny older kind lady who had too much money and not enough to do. Sassy, or ‘Christmas Star’ as she was known to the cat world, was a prima donna, if you know what I mean. She ate special food and drank water from a special dish that had come from Elizabeth Arden many years ago. After several years of growing from a thin, skinny, crossed-eyed kitten, Sassy grew into a beautiful, regal princess.

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