Southold Native: "Exploring History Through the Eyes of
Author Rosemary McKinley"
I recently interviewed Rosemary McKinley – a former English teacher who turned her back on decades of frontline teaching for a whole other life – that of a successful author. Though she’d always planned to stay in the classrooms until she was 60, her mother developed cancer, and she stayed with her in her final days. She stopped teaching and was left feeling bereaved and seeking some kind of space.
Writing became her way, and she wrote to clarify her thinking and feelings on a daily basis. When faced with the temporality of life, she decided to quit teaching and ‘write or die.’ There was no way she could turn that down. She had actually gone to college on a callow scholarship to a writing institute to improve her teaching, not her writing.
She mentioned that it had been embarrassing and hard to claim the identity of a published novelist after being a veteran teacher for so many years. With each form of the rejection letter, she received an ounce of self-esteem that was slowly stripped away. The lesson was that writing is at the mercy of others who make your dreams possible. Here, don’t pine for that dream. As blogging and landscape, she needed to manuscripts by email and connect with others in cyberspace to learn the ropes. She dreamt of becoming published, which finally became a reality after considerable time and hard work.
Rosemary is the author of several books, three of which are about the North Fork.
North Fork: 101 Glimpses of the North Fork and the Islands, a collection of prose vignettes about life in and around the North Fork; Captain Henry Green: A Whaler, a biographical novel about a local whaler; and The Wampum Exchange, another biographical novel about a highly successful matriarch in early 18th-century mixed communities and societies on eastern Long Island. Her stories, articles, and poems have appeared in numerous periodicals, and she has contributed chapters to an anthology on Writing After Retirement that, in turn, has inspired its readers to write.
More About the books:
- North Fork: 101 Glimpses of the North Fork and the Islands: The natural wealth of the North Fork has been attracting people for over four centuries. The Algonquin Indians, as well as later Dutch and English colonists, first appreciated the region for its bountiful waters teeming with clams and fish, its fertile soil for agriculture, and its plentiful forests ideal for shipbuilding. Many have been drawn to the allure of the inlets, creeks, and bays and have noted the contrast between the ruggedness of the Long Island Sound and the peacefulness of Peconic Bay. Local author Rosemary McKinley presents the maritime history, charming coastal landscapes, and verdant scenery of this scenic area in this visual chronicle.
- Captain Henry Green: A Whaler: Captain Henry Green (1794-1873), born in the seaport of Sag Harbor, New York, made his first voyage at sea in the whaler Fair Helen in 1817 as a ‘green’ boy, eventually rising to mastery of the Hannibal and several other whaling vessels over the course of his twenty-six-year career. His whaling life is heavily biased toward Sag Harbor and the Sag Harbourites who lived and worked there, and, as Sag’s premier whaling captain, he gives us a unique view into the vitality of Sag Harbor. A prosperous master of the Sabina, he kept a journal of that voyage while sighting the infamous slave ship Amistad and the search for gold in San Francisco. He was an ordinary man who lived an extraordinary life.
- The Wampum Exchange: The Wampum Exchange (2016), set in 1650 Southold, New York, is about a 12-year-old boy who meets a Native boy, and their relationship and respective worlds merge through their daily experiences, a rich way to travel 360 years back in time to see America as it really was then. Great for middle-grade readers and adults alike.
Check out the Amazon link to purchase-
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Rosemary+McKinley%22&i=digital-text&crid=37T00WREGJ9IN&sprefix=rosemary+mckinley+%2Cdigital-text%2C70&ref=nb_sb_noss
Her story is indeed inspirational—a reminder that you can always find your passions later and transform yourself. Rosemary’s story of inspiration and reinvention is one we can all carry around with us.
