Hi, I am Kerri Jesmer who is extremely grateful to Team Stay Featured for publishing this short write up.
I’ve always written poems and stories from the time I was old enough to put words on paper. I’m not sure I was aware of what brought those words to me until I was in my sixth or seventh year of school. Then my older sister gave me a Ray Bradbury book to read titled, “I Sing the Body Electric”, filled with short stories he had written. And I fell in love with my first author.
I read everything I could get my hands on by him. Later I discovered Orson Scott Card and C. S. Lewis, among others. What an incredible gift reading is, allowing us to travel the universe and everywhere in between.
And what a joy it is to be a writer! I love seeing something that influences me and to create a story from a single word, a picture, an overheard comment or something I see when out for a walk, driving down a street, watching children play in a park. I’ve even created a story from the title of a book. One such story was from, A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry.
From that, a distant cousin had mentioned that as his mom had aged, he’d started to tease her about being an ‘old raisin’ because of her many wrinkles. She’d been a heavy smoker and a sun worshipper who tanned frequently and her skin suffered the consequences. It wasn’t meant to be mean and she never took it that way. But I used the title of Ms Hansberry’s book and my cousin’s story to write a story of an old woman who had worked in the fields of her family farm her entire life in the early 1900s and as she sat and told her life’s story to her grandchildren, one of them noticed her face was almost as wrinkled as the raisins he was eating. The world is filled with stories waiting to be told by someone who can see it. I’m grateful I have been blessed to be one of those storytellers.
if you want to follow me on Facebook, here's the link