Midlife Crisis?

Be Inspired by Novelist Marlaina Donato

        Bucks County Women's Journal  

         August/September 2013            

by Linda C. Wisniewski 

Marlaina Donato believes that “words are sacred; words are energy.” She spent nine years writing her novel Broken Jar and says “I could never have written it in my twenties or thirties.”

Donato’s mother took her to visit the Pearl S. Buck estate when she was eight and showed her little girl the famous author’s desk. “It was nothing less than magical,” Donato says, noting that some scenes in Broken Jar come directly from the years she lived in Bucks County as a child. When she was 10, she began a weekly 4-H column in her local newspaper. As a teenager, she started a novel and hired a typist who was also a professional editor, a woman who taught her the basics of writing. With no other formal training, Donato found her own voice.

Broken Jar is the story of Tee Buckley, a woman in midlife who suffers great loss and finds redemption in the Bucks County town of New Hope. Donato says writing the book helped her navigate her own losses and life transitions. “Don’t be afraid to write from the solar plexus, the deepest emotional place of your own experience,” she advises. And “make writing a priority. Let your stories out of the prison of excuses and never settle for less than your own level of excellence.”

Now living in rural New Jersey, Donato is also an accomplished painter, photographer, and composer. She is certified in massage and bodywork, clinical application of essential oils, Reiki I, and hospice volunteer work. She is an essential oil practitioner and meditation instructor specializing in eclectic women’s spirituality and the Sacred Feminine. With all these accomplishments, how does she find time to write? “We make time for the gym, our kids’ extracurricular activities, salon appointments...make writing just as important, and you will find time. If you write just one page a day,” she says, “you’ll have a draft or a finished manuscript in a year.”