Introducing Myself

Hail Fellow Writers Rising! My name is Deborah Clarke-Blome, and I am very happy to finally join this wonderful blog at the invitation of my friend, writing group partner, and yoga buddy, Kathy Jenkins. I am an English as a Second Language teacher, mother of a beautiful 11-year old boy, and partner in a very long-term relationship (which is either the same relationship with three or four different people or several different relationships with the same person). I spent the first fifteen years of my life living in Hong Kong, Thailand, and Taiwan with a year or two in between in Pennsylvania and Virginia. About every third summer my family would return to the U.S. and I would catch up on American culture--mostly by watching TV--which we had sparse access to overseas. Although as a child I pined for life in America, I truly treasure my multi-cultural past. In particular, I am grateful for my experiences living in Bangkok in the early 1960’s. Bangkok is my aesthetic root: my imagination was born there and will be forever stamped by the sights, sounds, colors and smells of life in the tropics. I’m still interested in travel, but right now I’m settled in Seattle, WA, giving my son the kind of stable, neighborhood-based childhood that I never had. In different periods of my life I’ve worked on writing fiction, short essays and memoir but have never tried to publish anything. This year I decided to make an effort to be read by others outside my circle of friends.