PROMPTED TO POST | THE NAME GAME | KNOW & TELL

Meet Maria Rattray

Anatomy of Her Acronym

Who does your acronym say you are?

Musical, but no virtuoso…maybe in another time another era…but maybe not. You need a lot of staying power and determination to be one of those. :)

A late-starter marathoner, hooked from the first two km I ran without stopping. Ran my first marathon on Bougainville Island in PNG.

Rattray by marriage. Not sure what to feel when people talk about getting away from the Ratt-rays!

Intent on being the best human I can be, without sinking into the boring category. It’s a challenge.

Assuredly I am an absolute angel. Just ask my daughter. :)

Reliable, but only on the occasions when I can be relied upon.

A lover of poetry. If you ever need a soliloquy, just call me. When my daughter was going through her stretching the boundaries years, I vowed to write a book called Everybody Else’s Mother. I never got around to that, but I did write a poem here, with that title.

Touching on poetry, I also like writing elegies. Creating mood is challenging, but satisfying. I just love poetry, but I’m not a top Medium writer in that genre. In fact Top Writer eludes me. :)

Teetotaller…maybe in another life! It’s my husband’s fault. He introduced me to wine.

Riter…damn the vagaries of English spelling rules! I’m a writer when the ‘w’ is necessary.

Alistair is married to me. I served him two portions of haggis at a Robert Burns dinner. We haven’t eaten haggis since.

Young at heart, but the Covid lock-up and paucity of hairdressing, forced me to face the fact that I had more than a few grey hairs.

What genre(s) do you write across?

On Medium I write about teaching, parenting, health and nutrition, sustainability, gardening, and whatever lodges in my mind.

Sadly, I have this particular disability that, however hard anyone tries, nobody will ever be able to niche me. You know that shiny object??? I just have to go there.

Sorry about that!

I have written a number of books which I am currently trying to port from Amazon to Gumroad.

My favorite is In The Name Of My Father. Its genesis stems from my observations growing up in a small village in Scotland, in a judgemental Catholic community.

My husband’s favorite is Outsmarted. It’s a very funny book, written for 10 to twelve year olds. The two main characters just walked into my web one year…a super-clever student in my class, and a super-snobbish mother, whose son was in my class.

Needless to say, the child is the one who teaches his mother to pull her head in.

In real life neither is connected. In real life I HOPE they know nothing about the book. They may well see themselves in it.

When did you start writing?

I remember ‘writing’ before I started formal education. I was such a genius. What could be difficult about writing when I was already au fait with curves and sticks?

Then I started school and the rules changed.

The truth?

In high school I wrote about a doctor who was out walking in the woods and a tree fell on him, pinning one of his arms under a limb.

The walk was one that not many people took and he realized that time was against him. If he didn’t cut his arm off, he would die.

So with his trusty knife that he carried with him always, he began the excruciating task of severing the limb.

He survived.

The report about my writing was that I’d never be a writer because my imagination was beyond credible.

So when the bottle of pills didn’t work…

Somehow people thought I could write, and somehow I always got conned into writing ‘occasional’ stories in my last school…like stories for occasions…somebody leaving, a new baby, a CV…and I managed to deliver.

A friend and I used to produce musicals for the students in their last year of primary school.

One year we did Joseph and His Technicolour Dream Coat. I wrote the narrative and got lots of praise for it. The ‘dream’ was born and Joseph knew nothing about it.

Where are you located in the real world?

In the land Downunda…Australia, Canberra, to be precise.

If you plan to pay me a surprise visit, don’t make it this summer. So far it, summer, just visited for one day. We’re all back to winter clothing.

How do you create?

I can tell you this much. There is little order to it.

Pigsties have more order than my brain, and the circuitry within. Things pop into my head for no apparent reason, and I take everything from there…or not!

Why did you choose to write on Medium.com?

Further, why do you continue to write/read on this platform?

The answer to why I chose Medium is, purely for the money!!!

Okay, that was a joke. I earned cents for quite a few months, but each month I inched along incrementally, and I told myself that if Steven King could do it…

Besides fame always precedes money!

You know, the truth is, I have no idea how I even found Medium.

And why do I continue to write?

Though I am reluctant to admit this, Medium pulled me out of a dark place in my life. On and in Medium, I developed friendships that buoyed me along and removed the darkness. I will be forever grateful for that.

Thank you Hollie Petit, Ph.D and Toni Greathouse.

I have enjoyed responding to this prompt.