Elizabeth Diane Mack

I am a freelance writer based in Omaha, Nebraska. Along with blogging on aging, I am seeking representation for my coming-of-age memoir, Healing Springs, which follows my coming-of-age in the hills of the Ozarks in the 1970s, where I became a teen-aged bride and mother at the age of 15. After my father suffers a grave illness, my family is forced to move from the city to the paralyzing monotony of podunk Arkansas. Within a year, I find myself at 15 a high school dropout, married, and with a baby I don’t have a scant notion how to mother. Rural Arkansas and its natural healing springs serves as the backdrop to a story that weaves themes of self-worth, belonging, sexual discovery, first love, loss, abuse, and finally, perseverance, altering the course of a young life that seemed all but lost to the poor, rural community. Healing Springs is a story of hope and survival, a shero’s journey where I come to realize another cannot save me – I must be my own hero.