Blog Post

featuring.... Guest blogger Carol Sawada

                      and her fantastic talent for photography

 

Carole and I met in a chat room on Amazon about seven years ago. She lives on the east coast, I live in the southwest, but we have had the opportunity to meet personally on two occasions. She is a multi-talented individual who has led a very interesting life, and I've invited her to share that here with you.

     I don’t know if a picture is really worth a thousand words, but I have spent a lifetime creating pictures, first with crayons, paints and pens; with clay, wire and wood; with words; and lastly through film and the digital memory that has replaced it.

 

     I loved coloring, and an artist friend urged my mother to give me an endless supply of blank paper and crayons, finger paints, tempera and watercolors instead of keep-within-the-lines coloring books.  In kindergarten, I did a tempera painting so good after that my parents hung it on the wall a chance visitor spotted it and begged to buy it.  Who knows what my future would have been if my parents had sold it?

 

     At 14, an encouraging adult friend gave me my very first grown-up paints – tubes of acrylics with “good” brushes and artist quality paper, suitable for those paints.  In high school, I crammed 4.5 years of art classes into my schedule and prepared for either art school or an art major at a regular university.  But at 18, at 19, at 20, even 21, I didn’t realize that no artist ever creates anything as good as what she (or he) envisions in the mind.  Doubt discouraged me . . . at the same time I was falling in love with words and discovering a gift for writing, especially for writing essays.  I opted to major in English instead of art, abandoning the dream of a lifetime as a new dream opened up.  I wanted to write novels.

 

     After college, I fell into a job reporting for a daily newspaper in a small, agricultural community.  The job came with the use of a 35mm SLR camera – my first real camera – and an expectation that I would use it to illustrate at least some of my stories.  At first, both the camera and I were useless.  A frustrated photo editor swapped cameras with me, discovered my lens wouldn’t focus under any circumstances, and, after ensuring I got a newer camera with working lenses, started teaching me to take, develop and print photographs.

 

     I started winning awards for my photographs, as well as for my features and news stories, including a breaking news photo of a dispute between a small town mayor and its fire chief that resulted in the chief’s arrest and for a portrait of a small child dying of cancer.

 

     I went on to a bigger paper, where I was seldom allowed to shoot my own photographs, and then to an even bigger one, where I was never allowed to shoot a single photograph.  I had my own camera, though, and a friendship with one of the most talented photographers I’ve ever known.  My writing continued to win awards, including first place from the National Association of Black Journalists in the same year I was chosen as a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

 

     By the beginning of 1998, my discomfort with the direction the news industry was taking and my dream of writing fiction prompted me to give up journalism.  I had saved up enough money to support myself for a year, and it felt like the right time to take the risk – and try to write the kind of mysteries that had been my favorite reading since fifth grade, when there were no more unread biographies in the school library.  I lined up a mentor, the late Anne George, turned in two weeks’ notice, and then started writing.

 

     I never finished.  I got married – something I thought wasn’t going to be found in God’s plans for me – and became more interested in my new family than in my writing.  I also realized that, good as parts of the story were, my talents lay in telling someone else’s story, not in creating my own.  I quit free-lancing, quit writing.  I missed it, and in 2016 I launched a book review blog . . . and actually made a few bucks from it.

 

Part two of Carole's experiences, including what brought her back to developing her talent for taking pictures, will be my next post. Here are two more example of her recent work: