MARYSVILLE – Many of us think we are so different from our families that maybe we were adopted.
But J.R. “Judith” Nakken of Marysville thought she was so different that she must have been from Mars.
Thus her memoir is called, “Confessions of a Martian Schoolgirl.”
She entered the piece in a contest sponsored by LifeRich Publishing and Readers Digest Inc. Out of several thousand entries her piece is still in the running in the top 10.
The writing is about her school days from age 4 to 15. She first went to the first grade in a one-room schoolhouse at 4. She was then taken away by her mother and sent to kindergarten at another school.
“I skipped the first day,” Nakken said.
At age 15 she was to be the high school valedictorian, but instead she was expelled for refusing to apologize after insulting her English teacher.
“It was a troubled childhood,” she said. “I was not a good kid.”
Her short story ends with, “I married an earthling.”
Nakken said she wrote all the time when she was little, but stopped as a young adult because she couldn’t handle rejection.
“I was too thin skinned,” she said.
She went on to have a career as an accountant before retiring to Tulalip at age 62. At 78, she has now authored a number of books that have sold well locally.
She hopes if she wins this contest she will become nationally known.
“I have all the validation I need” as a writer, she said. “Now I’d like to make some money.”
Nakken has four books for sale on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the Tulalip and Angels of the Wind gift shops and Rainbow’s End in Everett.
They are:
• “Stream and Light, a woman’s journey”: memoirs of 24 stories and three essays.
• “Three point shot”: about high school basketball and prejudice.
• “Sweet Grass Season”: a love story.
• “Jacey Cameron in the Lost State of Franklin”: about magic and time travel.
The last book was supposed to be a trilogy, but Nakken stopped at one because interests among youth have changed.
“If it’s not about vampires or forbidden sex 11-year-olds won’t read it anymore,” she said.
