After her 57-year-old mother died of Lou Gehrig’s Disease,
Largo writer Patricia Lorenz decided to memorialize her in a story. “Eighty percent of writers start after a death because they
need catharsis,” she says. “I didn’t want to write another ‘Dead Grandma’
story. My mother was funny, and I wanted the world to know her sense of humor.”
So Lorenz wrote a short piece titled “The Baggy Yellow Shirt” and decided to
submit it to Guideposts, a magazine
that features inspirational stories. This decision changed her life.
Born and raised in Illinois, Lorenz graduated from Southern
Illinois University with a bachelor’s degree in English. She took a job with an
advertising agency and spent 16 years writing ads for radio stations. “I wrote
about 40,000 radio commercials,” she says. It taught me how to say a lot in 60
seconds.” Then, in 1982, her story won the Guideposts
contest. “They flew me to New York and put me up in a mansion,” she recalls. “I
met Norman Vincent Peale, Sue Monk Kidd, Marjorie Holmes, and many other famous
authors. They taught me how to write for Guideposts.”
Lorenz became so skilled that she began selling her stories to Guideposts and other publications.
In 1992, Lorenz received a phone call from Jack Canfield, a
co-founder of the Chicken Soup for the
Soul series. He’d read “The Baggy Yellow Shirt” in Reader’s Digest and asked permission to use the story in his second
Chicken Soup book. This began a long
relationship with the series. To date, Lorenz has had more than 85 of her
stories included in 60 Chicken Soup books.
Despite her professional success, Lorenz was less successful
in her personal life. After two failed marriages, she found herself a single
mother struggling to raise four children. “I always thought I’d have the
perfect life, but it didn’t work out that way,” she explains. “I was standing
in the wrong line when God gave out the husband-hunting gene.” She decided to
share her joys and trials in a book she hoped would resonate with other parents
raising kids without partners, and in 1996, her first full-length book, Stuff That Matters for Single Parents” hit
bookstores. Since then, Lorenz has penned 14 books and more than 400 magazine
and newspaper articles, essays and stories. She is also an award-winning
newspaper columnist and a contributing writer for Daily Guideposts books.
Lorenz’s latest book, 57
Steps to Paradise, chronicles her search for love in middle age. She admits
that it was the hardest book for her to write because “I had to unzip my soul
and expose so much about my foibles.” But she believes this is what will
connect with readers. “I learned early that readers don’t like perfection,” she
says. “They like to read about screw-ups. When I screwed up, I knew there were
millions like me. My take-away message is there’s a way to get through the junk
in life.”
Lorenz has just completed what she describes as “a Catholic
memoir” titled Slogging My Way to Heaven.
She is also finishing a 365-day devotional, Grabbing
on for Dear Life with Grit, Gusto and Grace. She hopes readers will enjoy
what she calls “the humorous bent” with which she approaches otherwise serious
subjects. “There’s not one person that doesn’t struggle,” she says. “As
writers, we identify with human struggles. And all our struggles make us
strong, more compassionate, more forgiving, more aware of our blessings, and
much more interesting.”
Lorenz plans to continue following her dreams while she’s
still awake, writing and doing as much traveling as possible. “I have always
loved Benjamin Franklin’s quote, ‘Write things worth reading or do things worth
writing.’ For me, traveling and experiencing the human condition help me
find things worth writing.”
Patricia Lorenz is a
sought-after professional speaker. If you or your club, church or
organization would like to hire her as a speaker, contact her at
patricialorenz4@gmail.com or visit her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/WriterSpeakerPainter/
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