• Kaleidoscope                                                                         Under editorial review


• Gods and Grunts: The Grunt’s Pocket Guide 
   to Corporate America

• An affair of the heart: ethical implications
   of The Jarvik-7 artificial heart

• Winter Nights                                                                         Spring 1977 Postage Due, 
                                                                                                 MI Council for the Arts

• A Special Bond                                                                       Spring 1979, Honorable Mention 
                                                                                                 Grand Rapids Press                                               

                                            

Excerpt from Kaleidoscope, 2007

Somewhere around the age of 12 girls become women. We celebrate with ritual our ability to create new life; and so thus take our place in society as women.

Soon we immerse ourselves in relationships with others. We are daughters, sisters, mothers, wives, co-workers, and friends. We “tend and befriend” and through this process define who we are as individuals.

Later, we enter a new era. Aside from a cheeky musical and coffee mugs that reference hot flashes, we forgo all societal ritual about this new phase in our lives and presume that we must now deal with the silent grief of losing our ability to procreate. Do we lose that which makes us women?

Hardly. For strong women, a funny thing happens between 12 and 50. We become comfortable with all of our roles, all of our choices and learn to appreciate all the fragments that make up who we are. Even if they are painful, likes bits of shattered glass.

And by the time we turn 60 or 70, we have learned how to integrate all of those experiences into each of our personas. We understand how each brilliant, colorful part of ourselves was chosen and shaped by specific and purposeful meaning.

We master the ability to open ourselves up to change and embrace the speed with which we transform ourselves, depending on to whom we are tending and befriending at the time. With a flick of the wrist, a new pattern appears, one that is still contains our best attributes, but each time different in arrangement.

For strong women never stop growing. We move from bearing babies to birthing wisdom. Most importantly, we learn to appreciate all of our content, no matter how we acquired it. In the occasional glimpse here and there, we marvel at the deep, rich colors that make up the kaleidoscope of our lives.