Tag Archives: SINGLE PARENT POVERTY

Starting the blog is. . . scarey!

Being unspeakably excited dilutes the fear – a bit.  Thirty 30 years ago, when I first began seriously writing, cocky confidence sustained me.  Now, after decades of delay, I step into this new world of writing, knowing I must create my own audience.  No more futile hopes of advances big enough to live on, hopes spun from frail threads of a couple of amateurish book proposals.

Though I am a subject matter expert (as we say in research) on functional poverty, still. . . doing this challenges my faith.  “Functional poverty” is a term I coined in 1988 for my second failed book proposal.   At that time, it had been 11 years since the divorce, and for those 11 years my daughter and I had lived with nary a nickle to spare.   I called the book “The Happy Have-Not” because I had learned contentment in the midst of deprivation, at least deprivation by United States standards.

More than ten years later, I completed the manuscript for “Unjealous Heart”, a more mature version of the same material and sold a summary of it as an article.  Then, I went to grade school full-time, and life took a non-authorial turn for a few more years.

As I am, this week, planning my website and blog, I am still living close to the bone.  I have a 325 square foot apartment, a small pension and two part-time jobs.  This “Unjealous Living” blog is the sequel for “Unjealous Heart.”  That book is about raising a child in single parent poverty.  This blog is about me, a single adult, living above the federal poverty threshold, albeit, still in functional poverty.

The book and the blog are both true, except for fictitious names for my family. During all the years I wrote late at night and early in the morning, I kept praying for God to let me “write right out of my life.”

He has been so very faithful to do that, and I so look forward to sharing that story with you!