On one of our travels to France, our family visited the Abbey of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys which faces the Atlantic Ocean from a high hillside. In the Twelth Century, the Abbey was a place of exile for the Abbot Peter Abelard. If one looks closely at the photograph, the silhouettes of two people may be seen, our…
My husband’s chosen profession was that of a United Methodist minister, a position that offered him little family time. To solve that problem, he began saving his vacation days which allowed the four of us to return again to Chartres, France (pictured below) three years later, where we stayed a week, renting a room from…
In its own right, the existence of this novel is an epic story of its own. Years ago, when I finished grad school, my intent was to teach college English which I did for several years and found I loved teaching. My life, however, radically changed after I met the man I married and moved…
On May 11, 2020, Miriam’s second novel A Stone for Breadwon the 2020 Eric Hoffer competition Legacy Award, which placed the novel on the short list for the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize. Prior to publication, the Stone for Bread manuscript was a top-ten finalist in the 2014 International Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Novel Competition. In 2016, it was nominated for North Carolina’s prestigious Sir Walter…
I wrote my Doris Betts Literary Award winning story Lucky some eighteen years ago. I had just stepped down then as coordinator of an inner city program in Charlotte, N.C. for Southeast Asian teenagers. How I had even found myself in that position resulted from “one-thing-led to-another” decisions that kept me at it for over…
Our group wasn’t the first such program in this area of Charlotte. Before I came out there, the church already had a Wednesday evening meal for area children. My husband and others had also helped facilitate several programs among Southeast Asians in neighborhoods not far from our site, one in a large downtown church, another…
It wasn’t long before more volunteers arrived and the Cambodian pastor and his congregation moved to the same site. Soon these programs were welcoming neighboring children and the programs were sharing the church and field. Volunteers from Charlotte churches began providing meals for the Wednesday and Sunday evening events and soon a program director was…
It began with a beach trip. Loading up the ministry bus, which the Cambodian pastor drove, we spent several days at a place at Myrtle Beach we’d found to host our group at a reasonable cost. After this trip, in which one of the guys broke his leg playing basketball at a nearby gym, we…