National Hospice Foundation

The Terri Schiavo case brought end-of-life decisions to the forefront. Hospice care is a choice you make to enhance life for a dying person. A person with a terminal disease may choose to die at home with the support of family, friends, and caring professionals. Hospice care emphasizes comfort measures and counseling to provide social, spiritual and physical support to the dying patient and his or her family. All hospice care is under professional medical supervision. Over 90% of hospice care is provided in the patient's home. Your local hospice organization can help you avoid a similar situation, and provide resources for further research, some of the myths of dying, withholding of food and water, and information on living wills.

Visit the National Hospice Foundation Online

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Living the Writing Life -- To Its Fullest

An Interview with Author Julie Mars
Julie Mars is a writer with a split personality. She’s written and sold both fiction and non-fiction, and published books both serious and frivolous. Mars also splits her time between writing and teaching, helping mold young, aspiring writers into accomplished wordsmiths. She has taught composition, creative writing, business, tech and journalism in classrooms as diverse as high schools, colleges, prisons, and on Indian reservations.

Julie is the recipient of the New York State Council of the Arts Grant for Screenwriting, the New Jersey Council of the Arts Grant for Fiction and the Cone Fellowship for Criticism. She has worked as a gift book writer for Ariel Books (she wrote about 50 mini books for them), sold options on two screenplays, and has worked as a journalist and in Hollywood as a film script analyst.

The Albuquerque, New Mexico home she shares with her husband, a dog, and two cats is “a big old adobe wreck” they are constantly renovating. “We do all the work ourselves. Lately, I have become quite the tiler,” she says. The house is near the zoo, so she hears the sounds of monkeys, seals, and birds every day.

Born and raised in West Point, New York, where her father taught unarmed combat and martial arts at the U.S. Military Academy, Mars says she was sixteen years old before she discovered that all men did not wear uniforms. “It was very stressful for me there. Once I got away, I never went back, and ever since, when I take the train on the opposite side of the Hudson River and see the house I was raised in, I always feel a vague sense of panic.”

Her favorite authors are Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor, and of writers working now, she particularly admires Kate Braverman, Keri Hulme, and Margaret Atwood. “When I'm in the mood for a mystery, I look for the latest book by James Lee Burke,” she says.

Mars’s own first literary suspense novel, The Secret Keepers, was published by GreyCore Press in 2000. Now GreyCore has released A Month of Sundays: Searching for the Spirit and My Sister, a memoir that’s received three BookSense nominations. Borders and Walden Books are promoting it nationally for Mother's Day, and Barnes & Noble has selected it for the May, June, July "Discover Great New Writers" program.

A Month of Sundays is part memoir and part pilgrimage. The book describes the seven months Julie spent as her dying sister’s primary caretaker, and then, after her sister died, chronicles Julie’s visits to 31 houses of worship in 31 weeks. It is an intimate portrayal of a woman’s effort to find an outlet for her grief and to get some spiritual questions answered. In spite of the dark subject matter, the book is quite funny in places, and always luminous and insightful.

We asked Julie Mars about the many and varied aspects of her life as a writer, and the cathartic exercise of writing about the loss of her sister.

IP: You’ve written many different kinds of books. What kind of different approaches do you take to the different styles of books?

JM: I’ve done a lot of what I call "pen-for-hire" work, primarily writing those little gift books you see at the cash register in bookstores. For those, my approach is 100% pragmatic: find out what the editor wants in terms of voice, tone, and content, and deliver it on time to the exact number of words (or even letters!) required. Writing those is like being a part inside a clock. You can’t make any unnecessary motions. Everything has to be precise and efficient.

For fiction, my approach is to wait attentively until some image captures my imagination. Usually, for me, there’s a moment in my real life that is an entry portal into an alternate life in my imagination. Obviously, I have to be very careful about noticing it. For example, for The Secret Keepers, my novel that came out in 2000, the whole book started based on a random glance from a man in line at the post office while I was getting my mail. I received that glance and POW! It knocked me into the other world (the imagination), and after that, it’s all about making the time and space for the story to come through.

My current book is my first full-length work of creative non-fiction. I felt so discombobulated by my sister’s death, by all she went through and what I went through by proxy taking care of her, that I was really just trying to manage the confusion and grief. This book demanded to be written. What else could I have done? So I guess I’d say my approach to this one was just to use the writing process to find my way through a maze that I got temporarily trapped in by the events in my life.

IP: In your new book you really expose yourself to and share intimate thoughts with the reader. Where in the back of your writer’s mind are the questions, "How much is too much?" and "Will it sell?"

JM: Let’s put it this way: A Month of Sundays: Searching for the Spirit and My Sister was originally twice as long as it is now. Everything that was thrown out was too much. It was interesting to me to see what kinds of categories the "too much" fell into. Sometimes it was personal information about my life, sometimes it was too detailed a recounting of what went on in each church, and sometimes it was drama-queen stuff. I was very lucky in that my agent, Theresa Park, worked with me on every draft of the book. She was able to guide me about how much was too much, which I would not have been able to see without her. I was often pretty stubbornly attached to things that I now see were totally extraneous, but letting them go was like the labors of Hercules for me.

As far as wondering if it would sell and having that affect the writing -- or especially the editing, I had my eye on the goal of doing the best job I could, of making it a good book. I just hoped that the selling would take care of itself, knowing full well, all the way, that it might not. Most of the writers I know work like dogs on their books, finish them, and try mightily to detach from whatever happens next because it’s out of our control. We can’t do one thing about it except hope that whatever is on the page is somehow also in the mass-imagination so all the people who contribute to the mass-imagination, which includes editors in publishing companies, will be receptive.

IP: How has writing A Month of Sundays changed your attitude toward writing?

JM: It took a while for this feeling to set in -- it's recent -- but I notice that I'm a little scared of starting a new writing project. I can't imagine any other writing experience being so intense or requiring such a total immersion in emotion. I was really sorting out something important in this book, and having been on the front lines like that, I'm noticing that other potential non-fiction writing issues seem to pale by comparison. But I do feel compelled to write a book on the imagination. I'm trying to figure out how to remove my emotional expectations and find the right entry-angle. I'll let you know how it goes!

And luckily for me, I actually have a novel in its final stages. This one took me ten years, very off and on, to write, and I finished it just after the last draft of A Month of Sundays. It's a comedy called Anybody Any Minute about a menopausal New Yorker who forsakes the city, her husband, and life in the fast lane to fulfill her lifelong fantasy of being an organic farmer. I laughed every day as I worked on that book. I'm about to go in for the final polish.

I'm really grateful that the manuscript, which I love, is already here. All I have to do now is make it better. That just seems like work. It doesn't have the scary edge of the new project, waiting to be born.

IP: Tell us about your writing classes, and how they differ, and what they have in common. Does the business of publishing ever come up? Can you teach a writer how to be marketable?

JM: Essentially, I teach three different types of writing: academic, technical, and creative (meaning fiction and creative non-fiction). A totally different teaching personality emerges for each one, and, though I’ve often wondered why, I’ve never been able to really step outside of whatever personality is dominant in each teaching situation. For academic writing, I become General Mars. I put the students through a writing boot camp, in which they have to produce work, more work, better work, constantly. I’m always giving them pep talks/orders along the line of, "Come on, troops! We have to take the next hill!" I run them ragged and then give them a little R&R when their papers come in (usually by giving them that day off).

For technical writing, I set up a number of progressively-more-difficult projects for the term. Some are individual and some are group jobs. I usually give one day’s instruction in the form of a "lecture," and then turn them loose to accomplish it. I monitor each student or group’s progress, and I suggest ways to improve and problem-solve, but I stay in the background, saying things like, "This has to be exactly as long as it needs to be AND NOT ONE WORD LONGER!" or "If it’s not reader-friendly, it’s not technical writing!", or "One more day until the deadline!" Everything is set up as if it were a business setting. I was saying, "You’re fired!’ years before you-know-who.

On the first day of my creative writing classes, I tell my students that my job is to be a strong fence around each one of them. It’s a speech that goes something like this: "I am going to keep everything out of the little patch of personal turf where you are trying to grow your writing. That especially includes doubt and criticism. Those are not allowed in this garden." Something like that. And then I do it. I clear a space for the writer to emerge by making the classroom experience and my personal connection to each student as nurturing as I can. I always feel, and I think the students feel, that we all jump off a cliff together, and in the end, when we’ve all survived and thrived, it’s amazing. I am usually stunned by the work that the students produce. More important, they are.

As for teaching anyone to be marketable, it’s not too hard to convey the standards of academic or technical writing, but for creative writing, it’s almost impossible. I stick to the "to thine own self be true" policy, and warn the students who ask that some great writers never get published, and some not-so-great writers make big bucks, and it’s all a crap shoot. And that’s really what I feel.

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A Month of Sundays: Searching for the Spirit and My Sister
by Julie Mars
Pub Date: April, 2005
ISBN: 0-9742074-5-4
Trade Paper; 6 X 9; 224 pp; $12.95

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Julie Mars grew up in upstate New York, and now lives and teaches in Albuquerque, NM. She is 54, married, and has a dog named Maggie and two cats named Pancho and Lupe. Recipient of the NYS Council on the Arts Grant in Screenwriting, the NJ Council on the Arts Grant in Fiction, and the Cone Fellowship for Literary Criticism, her first novel, The Secret Keepers, was published by GreyCore Press in 2000. Her second novel, Anybody Any Minute, is nearing completion.


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