"Rowena" by Janice Luckey
—say the words
“Trained up right,” a messenger arrives unexpectedly, lingering just long enough to stir up an enduring lesson.
Janice Luckey lives in Davidson, North Carolina, where she is a member of The Write Stuff writing group sponsored by her local library. Writing became a rhythm of her life when she scribbled a romance novel in a three-ring binder in junior high school. This sparked a life-long love of all things writerly—writing, reading, journaling, and hoarding office supplies. Janice contributed to That Southern Thing, the 2019 PSPP and recently LKNConnectCommunity.com published two essays. When Janice is not writing, she can be found encouraging her four granddaughters’ creativity or roaming about libraries, bookstores, and Staples®.
Author’s Talk
Janice Luckey
Rowena. Isn’t it a great name? It’s a name out of the past, an old-fashioned name which conjures up a sense of nostalgia for me like a double wedding ring quilt or a steaming bowl of chicken and dumpling does. Rowena’s attributes were old-fashioned as well. She was a loyal friend, a kind neighbor, a compassionate soul--hardworking yet meek. My previous story, published in That Southern Thing, the 2020 PSPP, profiled my grandfather who was cut from the same cloth as Rowena—hard-scrabble mill workers left behind in the disappearing textile south. It’s these every-day people, salt-of-the-earth people, that I feel the need to champion. I love to write about what they have to teach us. It has been said that stories should inspire, instruct, or entertain. I hope the story of Rowena meets that goal.
And I do love to write! It seems that I have always written, starting out in a pink diary with a tiny gold key to secure my inner thoughts as a child and through a turbulent adolescence. As a young mother, I journaled my inadequacies raising two children and through the inevitable trials and tribulations of life. I wrote it all out—acres and acres of notebooks—cheap therapy, but healing none the less. Now in these later years of less angst, I squirrel away my insights and truths for my granddaughters, and in the present upside- down world, I write to make sense of it all. I write to figure out what I’m thinking and experiencing and to find my place in this world. To honor the craft, I practice daily whether writing in a prayer journal or in response to a prompt. I also meet with other writers, with a writing partner and alone, trying on words like a new pair of jeans to see if they fit. I’d go so far as to say writing is the anchor to which my soul is tethered. - Janice Luckey
