by SueSpitulnik | Sep 16, 2022 | Columns
I met my husband in 2001 and soon started telling him about a family saga story I carried in my head. I talked about the details often but concluded I hadn’t figured out how to tie the story together. Finally, in 2013, while listening to live music one evening,...
by SueSpitulnik | Jun 25, 2022 | Columns
Collaborating to write an anthology can be very rewarding. Seeing your name in print one a story in a book is exciting if you’ve never been published before, even if you have. What does a project like this take to accomplish? That depends on who’s doing...
by SueSpitulnik | Nov 16, 2021 | Columns
If you’ve been around the Ranch for any time and read the weekly flashes, you know I am writing a fiction serial about Michael, an Army veteran who lost both of his legs in an IED explosion in Iraq. I had him going about his day in a...
by SueSpitulnik | Jul 27, 2021 | Columns
, The founder of my local veterans’ writing group, Lt. Col. Timothy Hansen, retired Army, invited Maj. Gen. Mari K. Eder, retired Army, to speak to the Rochester Veterans Writing Group during our ZOOM...
by SueSpitulnik | May 4, 2021 | Columns
Before my high school sweetheart entered the Air Force almost fifty years ago, I had never been on a military installation. I didn’t know once I married him when he got to tech school after basic training, we would both have a military...
by SueSpitulnik | Feb 9, 2021 | Columns
When you grow up in a small rural town in the Finger Lakes area of New York State as I did, you can hold on to some strange misconceptions because you don’t know any better. When I started moving around the US and the UK as a military wife I learned that dirt...
by SueSpitulnik | Dec 15, 2020 | Columns
At one of my recent Veterans Writing Groups sessions we wrote about staying connected as a family both while on active duty and after being discharged from the Armed Forces One man wrote that current technology helped him stay in touch with his family members via Zoom...
by SueSpitulnik | Aug 18, 2020 | Columns
The World War II vet tells of his experiences like they happened yesterday, or maybe last month. The reality, he is 95 and he is reliving days that took place 70 years ago. He explains their daily routine, as soldiers, was so structured that the feelings and memories...
by SueSpitulnik | Jun 22, 2020 | Columns
In the fall of 1971 as the Vietnam war was winding down my long time boyfriend enlisted in the Air Force to avoid being drafted. Seven months after I graduated from high school, I left my hometown to marry him after he finished boot camp. The husbands of the two...
by SueSpitulnik | Apr 28, 2020 | Columns
When you hear the word SERVICE, what flashes through your mind? Currently, it may be a picture of doctors and nurses. It could be your favorite restaurant server, your mechanic, or someone in the military. I was an Air Force wife from 1972–1979 and I waited...
