Hello, it's me

📖Hello it’s Me.🎶

From Judy Blume to Todd Rungren, the phrase is well known and well worn. But it fits for my first Substack post.

By way of introduction, I could have just cut and pasted my author bio—

oh maybe I will:

Ann Goethals is a retired high school English teacher and union leader who set aside her own writing aspirations for three decades in order to nourish those of her students. She retired in 2020 and has since focused her energies on her own writing. She has had various short pieces published in journals such as A Plate of Pandemic and Birch Bark’s MicroLit Almanac. Her first novel, The Doublewide, will be published in September 2025 by Mission Point Press. She is busy working on a sequel, tentatively titled Sheltering in Place. She divides her time between Northern Michigan and Chicago and is never far from the lake.

There’s always more to the story right? I raised two kids, traveled all over the place, first on a motorcycle and then with those kids in the back seat glued to past episodes of The Office instead of looking at the scenery we had burned hundreds of gallons of gas to bring them to. I loved almost every minute.

Oh, and dogs. What a cliche, but there I am.

I was born and raised in the Boston area, moved to the Midwest for college and never looked back. I fell hard for Chicago, its rough edges, its chip on its shoulder, the lake, the art, the music, the mashup of people and cultures. Then I fell just as hard for Northern Michigan, and set my first novel there.

There are all kinds of mosaic tiles that make up a person at any given moment, so I’ll try to fit these into a picture of me presently:

I am going to publish a book this year (see above). I am tasked with creating a “presence” on social media (I’m better in person). I’m wandering about in a universe that increasingly converses in images while I am a “processor of words” as my friend Roger Kerson likes to put it.

In the coming weeks and months I will be publishing short essays here on my writing process, the world of artificial intelligence, the lives of working class women (the subject of my book), how weaving saved me and other threads that I hope you’ll find worth your time. Stay tuned and get connected to me. I’d love to hear from you.