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Anita Speake
Memoir
A humorous, sometimes sad journey through the best of Western medicine and Eastern support systems as she navigates life with a serious heart condition.
Anita Swanson Speake was born and raised in Minnesota. She completed her nurse’s training and began her nursing career in Minneapolis before moving to Los Angeles. She spent thirty one years working as a registered nurse in emergency rooms and intensive care units. As she finished her career in nursing she was looking for something a little lower in stress and found exactly what she was looking for at the UCLA Writer’s Program and the Iowa Writer’s Summer Workshop. Her first book, Slow Hope: The Long Journey Home, was awarded four-and-a-half stars by Writer’s Digest. It also captured first place in Taproot Literary Review. Speake currently lives with her husband in Southern California, where she writes and tries to stay fit enough to keep up with her eight grandsons. Her memoir Heartsong is available now.
Read BookTrib’s review of Anita’s book, Heartsong.
BOOKS:
Slow Hope: The Long Journey Home (2005, 2007 Second Printing)
Heartsong: Living With A Dying Heart (2019)
Biggest literary influencers:
Anne LaMott – I love her honesty and humor as she deals with ordinary, difficult, and often conflicting issues of life, faith and occasionally politics. While our views are not the same on many issues her honest grappling with issues is a trait I aspire to.
Abigail Thomas – I like her storytelling through brevity of style.
Cheryl Strayed – I like her style of writing because she is a risk taker.
Last book read:
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
The book that changed your life:
Pieces of My Mother by Melissa Cisteros – She showed me how change my own writing to a better literary style.
Your favorite literary character:
Jo from Little Women or Elizabeth from Pride and Prejudice because they were both strong female characters facing adversity.
Currently working on:
Getting Heartsong out in May 2019 and promoting it after release.
Words to live by:
“Not all who wander are lost.” — J. R. R. Tolkien
Advice to new and aspiring authors:
“Only a mediocre person is always at his best.” — W. Sommerset Maughn
Articles / Reviews:
Testimonials:
“In Heartsong, Speake takes us on a journey that is quietly compelling and fiercely alive. As she scours the past and pulls us into the present, we are drawn in by her infectious humor and lovely, clear-sighted storytelling. Heartsong is a beautiful story of how one woman survives, thrives, and embraces humor in even the most painful days of her diagnosis.”
—Melissa Cistaro, author of Pieces of My Mother
“Speake’s story reminds us that in the midst of pain and the unknown of heartache, joy is there, hope is there, beauty is there, and God is there, even though He seems veiled. Heartsong is a book that lifts the spirit.”
—Dr. Garry Zeek, Senior Pastor, Grace Church, Kelseyville, CA
“One short chapter at a time, one irregular heartbeat at a time, Anita shares her life with us—honestly, humorously, unashamedly. If it is possible for years of heart-pain to cause the physical organ of a heart to break, Anita’s story quietly suggests that later years of love and faith can bind the heart up again, making it possible to finally truly live… while dying.”
—Wendy Speake, coauthor of Triggers and Life Creative
