Thursday, January 24, 2013

Writing Friends: Nancy Bo Flood


The internet was new( to me anyway).  It was 1993..or 4.  We had just returned from Haiti.  I was working on a quilt to auction off to raise money for Hospital Albert Schweitzer where we had lived and worked for 2 years.  I sent out a letter to the hospital email list asking for quilters to design a square for the quilt.

One of the responses came from Nancy Bo Flood.  Turns out she is a quilter ...and she lived for while in Haiti at HAS.  She writes children's books.  Like me!  She has four children and her husband is a doctor.

We emailed back and forth.  They lived in Malawi.  One of their sons was born there....a lot like me.  Is this internet connection thing getting creepy yet?  I had shivers.

At the time Nancy and her husband and some of her children were in American Samoa...I told my husband I knew where we would be going next.

Turns out we went back to Haiti for a year instead of American Samoa.  And Nancy and I lost touch.  Fast forward to 2009.  We applied to work with the Indian Health Service.  I heard Steve on the phone talking to a recruiter.  It was evident from the one sided conversation that I has listening too that there was a children's book author living in the Navajo community, at the very site where we would visit and apply to work.

More shivers..."Steve I know who it is,"  I said.  And it was.  Nancy Bo Flood lives around the corner from me.  We critiques each other's work and it turns out we have a lot more in common.  But she is not me and I am not her...quite.

http://nancyboflood.com/blog/

 Check out Nancy's books and her blogs.    

www.thepiratetree.com (children's lit and social justice issues) 
and 
www.ReaderKidZ.com  (linking books and young readers)

 http://nancyboflood.com






2 comments:

Leslie Davis Guccione said...

Well you've topped me on this one! So glad you found each other!

Anonymous said...

What a wonderful "next chapter" to become friends with Karen, a writer, an explorer, a woman who creates art from found objects and stories from conversations.

Thank you, Karen!

Nancy Bo Flood