Annaliese J.

There are a handful of organizations, and a handful of people, not always connected, that I can irrefutably claim have enabled me to walk the path I now walk as a 59-year-old woman who supports herself as a writer and editor. I guess many would call it my professional path, and it is, since it is how I pay the rent, it is the work I “do”; it is, however, much more than that, with all its attendant skills and accomplishments. This path has provided me with the lens through which I see and process the world. And it has provided me with a belief in myself, a critical addition to the equation of a successful life. And the path has been paved with the assistance of the MEOC hand.

On my path, within a small window right after my graduation from college in 1997, have been a divorce, the need to figure out how to support myself and how to keep my children in school, the death of a child, the loss of a home, and the relocation from a small town of 160 to a city of 35,000.

Without MEOC’s help, I never would have returned to college, approximately 30 years after I dropped out. I would not be supporting myself by writing and editing, including local, regional, national, and international publications. My most recent national publication was an essay on NPR’s This I Believe; I have work forthcoming in the collections A Coastal Companion and About Face, and continue to publish regularly in Bangor Metro magazine; I edit a monograph series for Haystack Mountain School of Crafts; my work has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. None of this work would have been created without my participation in this program. I am convinced of it.

I would not have clarified what is important in my life, both personally and professionally, and then taken the steps to assure that my life includes those components. I don’t just mean “tangibles,” but also the core aspects of a life worth living, like trust and integrity, compassion, community, inclusion, creativity, kindness, beauty, love. I no longer see the world through a lens of fear, but through a lens of possibility. That frankly is in large measure to the Maine Educational Opportunity Center.