In recent months, I’ve been deeply moved by a Story Circle Network blogging friend’s writing as she courageously brings forward her son’s long-term homelessness in California’s Bay Area. Margie Witt has written several compelling articles about her son’s journey from early rich promise in his life to his present journey on the street. She is also writing a memoir. To learn more, kindly follow this link to Margie’s recent Facebook post, This Man is My Son.
Tonight, on your local PBS station, Independent Lens is focusing on three homeless people. If you follow the link, the man you see in the photo is Margie’s son. I hope you’ll find the program on your local station (it’s at 10pm where I live in Virginia) and gain a deeper understanding of the roots of homelessness as well as considerations for what we can each do to help heal this heartbreaking problem that belongs to us all.
Should you read this post later than tonight, watch PBS listings for encore presentations.
About Mary Jo Doig
Mary Jo Doig was the first in her family to attend college and graduated from the State University at Oneonta in New York’s Catskill Mountains with a degree in Secondary English Education/Educational Psychology. There she fell in love with rural life, remained, and eventually transitioned from city girl to country woman when she married a dairy farmer and raised their three children on their small family farm.
A life-long lover of reading and writing, Mary Jo has for nearly twenty years been a member of the Story Circle Network. There she has been an editor, a women’s writing circle facilitator, a book reviewer, and life-writing enthusiast, working extensively with women writing their life-stories while writing her own memoir. Presently, she is a three-time Program Chair for SCNs national Stories from the Heart conference and a board member. She also facilitates Older Women’s Legacy workshops and a women’s life-writing circle in her area communities. Her stories have appeared in Kitchen Table Stories anthology, Story Circle Annual Anthologies, and most recently her story “I Can’t Breathe” was published in the Anthology, Inside and Out: Women’s Truths, Women’s Stories. Her work also appears in varied blogs and periodicals, on her blog Musings from a Patchwork Quilt Life (https://maryjod.wordpress.com), Facebook, and Twitter.
Her son and two daughters grown, Mary Jo presently treasures her country life in Virginia’s Central Shenandoah Valley. She loves cooking (and eating!) healthy food, reading, writing, quilting, hiking, and spending quality time with her rescue cats, Button and Xena, and beagle, Addie, who each dream of being only children.
Her first book, Patchwork: A Memoir of Love and Loss, will be published in October, 2018 by She Writes Press.
Musings From a Patchwork Quilt Life 
Mary Jo, Thank you so much for posting this.
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