Mert Guswiler

Mert (who seldom uses her last name unless she has to do so) is a native Ohioan currently living in Northern Kentucky, working on her fourth book. She has lived and worked all over the world, earning her living with words in a professional life that only can be described as eclectic.

Her successful careers include those of print journalist in the US and abroad, instructor/counselor/trainer, California lawyer, and contract technical writer/editor/researcher for government and private industry.

Initially published at the age of 14, her credits include three books (one of them a collection of poems), short stories, articles and essays. She has garnered awards both here and abroad in print journalism and other categories.

She currently is working on an anthology of stories about children, CHRISTMAS AND OTHER CHILDREN.

When not involved with various projects (and her other writing), Mert pursues an assortment of interests that include private study of astro/particle physics; reading; music composition/lyrics; hiking, and sailing. She can be reached by email at: mguswiler@hotmail.com

She has completed three books
• MANY LOVES AND FURTHER JOURNEYS
• ALL THERE IS
• A SOCK IN THE EYE
  Interested agents and/or publishers please take note!

MANY LOVES AND FURTHER JOURNEYS is the second collection of poems by Mert. The first, FIRST LOVE AND OTHER JOURNEYS, was published more than a quarter century ago and is now out of print. Some of the works from that first collection are here. However, much of this book is a record of journeys made and loves encountered since that time. The collection is one of impressions and responses to experiences both national and personal.

[An excerpt from the collection]:

Winterwest

Somewhere in the darkness
that is winter in Nevada
the cowboy morning-stands
hands in jacket pockets
puffs of breath exhaling
burning throat-breath
nose-tickling sharp inhaling
bridging the gap linking
wake-up and chores

overhead and marching through
fuzzy stars red-shouldered
Orion with dog Sirius
goes his eternal hunt near
fog-wrapped [blanket-covered]
blanket of Milky Way under
which rest far-off snow-streaked
mountains guarding basin
of great [Great Basin] and now

dim past [water-receded valley]
yet valley green pumpkin-strewed
coaxed from brown-blue-grayed desert.
Under boots the season's
slick-spotted crunch-covered
ground while near and overhead
birds sit on a solitary wire
like strung beads on a necklace
waiting for dawn-burst

the cowboy shifts his stance
heads toward the foghorn breakfast
cry of cattle in corral and
dimly-outlined horses
moving snorting maybe
remembering but knowing
they are wild no more:
yet like everything everywhere
beginning new day

2000 Marilyn Guswiler

ALL THERE IS , a novel, is a different kind of love story, a story of love as journey. It is Muffin's story. Born illegitimate, reared in institutions and foster homes with no name of herown, no visitors from the 'outside' other than caseworkers, and no siblings, Muffin stomachs what she later refers to as 'the silent years.' She survives physical and mental torment, and emotional starvation. She dreams of freedom, longs to be claimed, and yearns for identity and place. Her story is our story in its portrayal of the power of, and need for, love as acceptance, as compassion and as 'belonging' in all of our lives whether that life is lived as child, journalist, psychiatrist, nun, doctor, friend, teacher, or employer, the roles of the primary and secondary characters in Muffin's life and story.

(less than 30 seconds with 14.4 modem!)

A SOCK IN THE EYE, is a true humorous account of a 1960s four-year stint of working one's way around the world as a print journalist. In the 1960s BT (Before Terrorism), a young woman at the beginning of her print journalism career, decided to join the Peace Corps. She was not accepted by that august body which was just as well as things turned out; her motives were suspect anyway because all she really wanted was a free ride to Africa. Rejection by the Peace Corps was a disappointment, but only a minor one; all it meant was that the young woman would have to pay her own way to Africa. That turned out to be a good thing, as this account shows. The Peace Corps rejection also stamped indelibly on the young woman's mind and heart a kind of parameter that went, 'Do your own thing equals pay your own freight and if it doesn't, something more than math is wrong here.' This book, among other things, shows what wonderful things can happen when you don't give up and when you follow the advice of those sneakers that tell you to 'just do it.'

(less than 30 seconds with 14.4 modem!)

Mert is listed in WritersNet, Published Authors on the Net.

You can reach the author by emailing Mert.