April 7 2024 Memoir Church Guest
A Bio for Memoir Church
Valerie Kuhn Reid grew up during the fifties and sixties, in the storybook Village of Clarendon Hills, Illinois, in a storybook family that up and went to hell in a handbasket.
Graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1976 with majors in both Theatre and Education and determined to avoid another midwestern summer, she drove to the coast of New England looking for a teaching job. She found one in Kennebunkport, drove back to Illinois, put her belongings in a U-Haul and moved to Maine, forever.
Here she raised three children, taught school, acted, directed over forty high school productions, earned a masters at age 63, and yada yada, lived a life. But writing has been a persistent passion since childhood. When her kids were little, Valerie wrote short stories and children’s books, got a few rejection letters, and pushed it no further.
But still, she wrote and wrote and wrote, and years later, toward the end of her teaching career, Valerie pursued a master’s from the University of Maine in Orono, in Writing and the Teaching of Writing. That’s when writing took over. The sheer pleasure it gave her (plus some encouragement in the form of a short story published in Woman’s World Magazine and a couple of honorable mentions in the Writer’s Digest Annual Contest) propelled her.
One day she realized that much of what she wrote existed to answer the question: WHO WRECKED MY HAPPY HOME? And a memoir began.
Eight years later, after a full epistolary rewrite, and two years of title paralysis, it is finally done enough. It needs to be a book. One Stop West of Hinsdale. It’s a family saga, coming-of-age, memoir of transformation. I couldn’t have written it any earlier. I had to grow up and grow old to understand what happened to us. My little girl eyes needed another fifty years of experience to finally answer my question.
Now. To Self-publishing and Beyond!