Howdy,
My name is Mary Beth Mohn. I’m a writer and wannabe artist living in Edina, Minnesota.*
I retired from a corporate career in marketing and communications in 2024 to become a full-time caregiver to my husband who has been living with Parkinson’s Disease (quite gracefully, I might add) for more than 23 years.
Unfortunately, I am not a caregiver by nature. As the “baby girl” in a large family, I was more accustomed to being a care-taker, rather than a caregiver. (Case-in-point: I somehow managed to avoid making my own bed until my sister/roommate Nancy left home when I was 10.)
However, having gone through dementia with both parents as an adult, I now have plenty of experience with caregiving and know that it can be difficult and all-consuming work.
When my husband was first diagnosed, I realized that I was unlikely to have the retirement of my dreams. Now that I’ve reached that stage of my life, I’ve tried to shift my focus to the things I can do to find joy amidst the daily grind. I realize I must energize and restore my spirit if I am to stay sane. And I mostly am (with the additional support of family and friends).
This has led me to spend more time creating art–something I’ve always loved but had little time for when going to school, working and raising a family. (I earned two degrees as a working adult.)
However, I find it really, really hard to just…create. I’m a perfectionist by nature and hate it when my output doesn’t match my vision. Yet I know that the only way to improve is to create a lot of bad art at first.
This inner battle between perfection and practice is one I’m determined to overcome. Exhibiting my art at local art shows was the first step. Adding an accountability partner is another step (Hi, Steph!) and putting my work out here for you to see is yet another step in my attempts to “get over myself.” I hope you and I will both see continuous, eventual progress on this front.
Writing, on the other hand, is something I enjoy and that comes relatively easily after so many years of practice. The key, for me, is knowing what I want to write about.
For many years, I assumed I should want to write a novel–that’s what writers eventually do, right? Yet, it never sounded attractive to me. I finally figured out that this is because of my slightly neurodiverse/ADHD nature. A novel is too broad–there are simply too many choices to make and my brain just bounces from one to another like an out-of-control pinball game.
Nonfiction I can do. Memoir and opinion, certainly. I started a blog with a dear friend (Hi, Kit-Kat!) and while I have let that mostly fall to the wayside, I’m glad to have my thoughts on various topics to look back on–an online diary of sorts.
With the rise of AI, I feel the need to double-down on producing human-generated writing–em dashes and all. (My ADHD brain embraced em dashes way before ChatGPT, for their inherent ability to let me change direction midstream. And I refuse to abdicate them merely because some incompetent software might flag my writing as AI-generated. If that happens, rest assured it’s because that LLM was trained on articles written by me and other human authors.)
Recently, I decided to write a historical play and absolutely loved the process. I found that the historical constraints made it much easier for me to focus and writing dialogue, set descriptions and stage direction to be MUCH simpler than the more exhaustive descriptions sometimes found in novels (Mr. Charles Dickens, I’m looking at you.)
While I’m currently focused on bringing this effort–Square Deal–from page to stage, I’m also thinking about my next play. I’d like to do a story based loosely on my parents’ courtship and marriage. (Note: Something I never would have attempted if they were still alive.) This plot would center around my grandparents ownership of a supper club on the Mississippi River, The Riverlyn, in the 1940s. Let me know if you like the idea.
*As a long-time Richfield resident, I can’t quite bring myself to admit that I’m now a “cake eater,” although there are those around me who would say that the expanded form of EDINA (“Every Day I Need Attention”) is an apt enough descriptor for me.
