I am a featured guest at Richard Dockett‘s The Indie Showcase. Please come by to visit.

 

     Today The Showcase features a poet which is a first for the site, please welcome Miriam Hurdle.

 

Thank you, Richard for featuring me on your website today.

I grew up in Hong Kong where I spent my childhood, college and early career years. My dad made a great impact on me for my love of reading. He read every single day until he had a stroke at eighty-four years old. When I was at the fourth-grade, I read my dad’s newspaper. We traded sections to read. I read the horrible news describing the details of crime scenes, read adult fantasy, comic strips and the Sunday children’s section. In elementary school, my favorite literature was Aesop’s Fables. I read each story with the anticipation of learning the moral of the story. This literature has influenced my attitude toward life, my thinking and writing.

I wrote a diary as a teenager. The lessons in Aesop’s Fables weaved into the diary and I wrote what I thought of the events more so than what happened. As far as writing skills, I remember in the upper grades of elementary school, we learned how to write a story with an opening, middle, climax and ending.

After college, I worked as a Director of Children’s Department in a literature company. My job was writing children’s magazine. I worked closely with the illustrators in the Art Department. In fact, I recruited my artist. When I taught Chinese as a Second Language at the Baptist University of Hong Kong, he worked there also and sometimes wrote me notes at the end of the day, signed it and drew a little cartoon next to his signature. I liked his art so when I changed job, I remembered him. The comic strips I read in my early years helped me to communicate with the artists how I wanted to illustrate the stories in the magazine. The experience I had on this job also helped me to layout and illustrate my first poetry book forty years later.

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