A precocious childhood
I was born in Athens, Georgia, in the mid-1950s, smack in the middle of the post-WWII baby boom. With my only sibling already in her teens and a mother who had sung on local radio as a youth in the 1930s, I was exposed to the music that came before and the early TV age that came after.
Playing piano came naturally to me, and watching the debut of shows such as “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “I Dream of Jeannie” with my parents as a little kid gave me lots to play by ear. It also inspired me to yearn for a career as an actress in Hollywood. In the meantime, I read a lot, wrote some—-mostly poems, as I could finish them in one sitting, and engaged in creative play with miniature houses and animals and wooden blocks that I formed into house floor plans.
College and beyond
By college I had been active in choir and ensembles and dabbled in theater, art and writing. After changing my major several times, from art to art history and a few other far ranging interests and including a year of music courses at Berklee College of Music in Boston, I finally got my bachelor’s degree in history at the University of Georgia, in my hometown. My focus was on ancient history and intertestamental studies. I had planned to get a Ph.D. in that field, but decided against it after realizing that with all the language study it could take ten years.
Ultimately I got an M.Ed. in Rehabilitation Counseling, the study of helping people with mental and physical disabilities, but other than a few years of related work–I’ve been a psychotherapist and vocational evaluator–I’ve mostly done other things. Lots of communications and information services work and a variety of odd jobs. My favorite of those odd jobs was working in pet supply retailing, allowing me to build on my love of animals, especially dogs. During that period I also reported about dogs for a national website, and got involved in issues around pet loss bereavement, building on my counseling background.
California Dreaming
In case you’re wondering about those Hollywood dreams–what became of them? In 1999, in my 40s, I moved to Nashville in an effort to make it as a singer-songwriter. I did an album of my songs with some of Nashville’s finest session musicians, and a few gigs, including performing my song “Love’s a Prayer” on the wedding roster for an entertainer friend of mine. However, in spite of being a major ham as a kid, by now I found stage fright just too much to deal with.
While in Nashville I got involved in the acting/screenwriting community there. A highlight was working with famed Hollywood acting teacher Gary Austin, founder of The Groundlings theatre troupe that cultivated the careers of many “Saturday Night Live” and other well known performers—rest in peace, Gary—who was at the time holding workshops occasionally in Nashville. I had the privilege of participating in an acting/writing/performance workshop in 2001 in New Mexico, the Santa Fe Project, conducted by Gary; writer/director/performer Cheryl King; and industry professionals Carol Fox Prescott, Wenndy MacKenzie, and Hilary Chaplain. Wouldn’t you know it—one of my acting agents in Nashville got me a booking as an extra in a national Toyota commercial, but while I was at the acting workshop and didn’t get the call in time!
In the summer of 2003 I risked everything and moved to the Los Angeles area. I loved it there—it truly resonated with me, like I always thought it would. I was put in touch with some gracious people and made a barely subsistence (not) income there from temp work, my music, and writing for a local community newpaper group, but struggled to get established. Eventually, in spite of my wonderful new friends and my love of SoCal, the stress and some emotional ties to Nashville pulled me back there.
Then and now
At the end of 2013 circumstances led me again to the Boston area, where I currently reside. Music is a bit of a sore spot as I can’t sing now due to some vocal cord issues, and acting, well, the stage fright and a penchant for staying home at night kind of put a damper on that too.
I still love doing art in various forms, using the nonverbal part of me that doesn’t get as much work. Lately I have gotten into glue booking and junk journaling, which serves as both a creative outlet and a way to deal with clutter.
The writing, which I’ve done off and on since childhood, has become my key focus as a means of not just self expression but weaving together what can seem like disparate threads, hanging loosely but demonstrating a tapestry if you craft them and step back far enough. I’ve got a lot of material sitting in drawers and on my hard drive. Some fiction, much of it memoir. Some of it is poetry. There’re also a couple of unfinished plays in the mix, and some hybrid pieces.
Yeah, scattered. But if I’m ever going to get serious about doing something with my writing, the time is now. We baby boomers are not getting any younger! Time has a way of marching on, leaving us running to catch up with it.
Nancy Keeler 