Meet Judy Jerome

Judith A. Jerome: Personal Reflections on Writing

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.”

― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Stephen King’s comment on writing is the truthiest (Stephen Colbert’s word) ever.  At least that is my reality.  Writing begins with reading.  I have always been a voracious reader and over my span of many years, I have dabbled in the writing business itself.  It all really began when I was tapped to be Salutatorian of my high school graduation class and actually had to write a speech which I would need to deliver in front of friends and family.  But with the assistance of Mr. Robinson, my high school English teacher, I did it.  I actually have that address somewhere in one of my scrapbooks.

I loved Mr. Robinson, and believe me, L. R. Robinson was difficult to love.  He was our school principal who, upon retirement, became our English teacher.  In our K-12 building, we had learned early on that Mr. Robinson was strictly no nonsense and his hard nosed tactics were learned, at least according to the prevailing student grapevine, at the front line of battle during the Great War i.e. WWI.  

L. R. required us to write two essays a week and from these essays he would glean sentences notable mostly by the author’s total mutilation of the English language.  He would write these sentences on the blackboard and then with the assistance of the ‘audience’, they (the sentences) were shredded and then gradually re-constructed.  To have sentences from your essay appear on Mr. Robinson’s blackboard was to suffer the ultimate humiliation.  But did we learn!  Brutal honesty but education at its basic best.

I continued to write in college but honed my skills even more pointedly by becoming a technical writer at the BOCES where I worked as Director of library system which provided services for 113 schools.  I was writing policies and procedures and at the nascent edge of the internet, technology instructions and processes.  I had to learn it all myself and then write clearly enough that others would understand as well.

Then my life was changed when I was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship which took me to England for, initially, one year which lengthened into ten.  During that time, I polished my writing skills in various positions the most notable of which, at least in terms of my writing career, was as an IT Analyst with a private research firm.  We wrote and published technology analysis on the web and provided researched white papers on various emerging technology subjects.  Most of my stuff is available to access in the now deep archives of the world wide web.

Returning to the US, I was hired as a Director of Dunham Public Library which was actually a position which I held decades ago at the beginning of my career.  I created the first writing group at Dunham which has now flowered under the care and attention of Carol Alexander.  (Thank you, Carol).

There are many life-spaces to be filled in here which will emerge over time as I continue to write, now during my retirement years.  Needless to say, I feel inadequate but honored to be featured as Writer of the Month for the Whitesboro Writers’ Group.  Thank you again, Carol, and also, thank you, Mr. Robinson.