Last week, I turned 60. First gift, my new book, Gifts of Grace, was released:
https://www.amazon.com/Gifts-Grace-Kathy-McKinsey-ebook/dp/B08T7ZHLMZ
But that was hardly the end.
My middle kids—Caleb, Rebecca, and Sarah—planned and
prepared a great surprise for me. An “Author’s Treasure Box.”
They collected quotes by writers, for writers, prompts to
jump-start your writing on a dry day. They brailled them and cut them in
strips, then stuffed them in a pretty little box.
I was delighted, sitting at the dinner table, reading
through all of them.
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the
typewriter and bleed.” Ernest Hemingway
“Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb
the comfortable.” David Foster Wallace
“I can shake off everything as I write. My sorrows
disappear, my courage is reborn.” Anne Frank
“Write a story from an inanimate object’s perspective.”
Write about your favorite daughter.” (Wonder who came up
with that one?)
“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” Richard
Bach
“A shoe falls out of the sky. Why?”
“Write about your favorite son.” Hmmm.
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story
inside you.” Zora Neale Hurston
Fifty treasures.
I kept looking up at Sarah saying, “You guys, you guys.”
She said they wanted to do something special for my 60th.
Ping-Hwei and Murray listened as I read. Murray grabbed onto
the prompts and took off to make up stories.
What a special time. Such a lovely reminder of what a precious gift my family is to me.