Jacqueline Potter is the author of two novels under a pen name for Berkley/Jove, personal and historical essays, profiles, opinion pieces, meditations, reflections and poetry which have appeared in numerous publications and books. In 1968, she began writing “beach poems” on vacations with her husband and children at Hilton Head Island, S.C.. During the 1970s, the poems often appeared in The Islander magazine, Hilton Head, and became the starting point for By Surf and By Stream, Illustrated Poems, Stories and Reflections.
She is a member of Missouri Writers’ Guild and Ozarks Writers’ League, among others, and is listed in the 2006, 2007 and 2008 Who’s Who in the World. Educated in Missouri, Illinois, New York City and California, she attended UC/Berkeley for two years and earned a B.A. in English from the Univ.of Illinois, Champagne/Urbana. She credits postgraduate training at Mo.Southern State Univ., Joplin, Short Courses in Professional Writing at the H.H. Herbert School of Journalism, Okla. Univ., Norman and many other writers’ conferences and workshops nationwide, especially the OWL quarterly meetings and PASIC, for teaching her so many practical things about craft and writing for publication. Jacqueline signed with her first NY agent as the result of a tip from a speaker at a one-day Ozark Artists’ and Writers’ Conference at Crowder College, Neosho, Mo. She has judged poetry, novel, nonfiction and short story contests for such organizations as the Ozark Artists' and Writers' Guild, Romance Writers of America Golden Heart award and the Helen S. Boylan Foundation writing awards for senior high school students. She sometimes gives talks about writing for Senior High Career Days.
A nature lover devoted to her four-generation family, she lives with her artist husband of many years on a high bluff overlooking a creek in southern Missouri, where they take pleasure in watching changing seasons and abundant wildlife.
Jacqueline Potter has been writing poetry since she was “hooked” in third grade at P.S. 101 Forest Hills, Long Island, N.Y. Her family had just moved there from Kansas City, Mo. The next year they moved to New York City’s Upper West Side, and all spent summer with her grandparents on their Southwest Missouri farm.
“ My love affair with the seashore began on the East Coast” she says, “and only intensified when I lived in Long Beach, California, and the San Francisco Bay area. That love affair goes on, no matter where I live.” In the early 1970s, she began writing “beach poems” which often appeared in The Islander magazine at Hilton Head Island, S.C. and became the starting point for By Surf and By Stream. For the last twenty years, the dramatic coast and islands of the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii also have inspired her poems and reflections.
“My Southwest Missouri roots grew long and deep and kept pulling me back, no matter how much I loved other places,” she says. In her personal essay Migration Patterns in Echoes of the Ozarks, Vol. II, © 2006 Ozarks Writers League from AWOC.COM Publishing, she wrote “Spring River called me back, Carthage called me back, the Ozarks called me back, no matter where I lived.”
“Everyone knows water is essential to life, but for me, water is symbolic of creative flow and inspiration. The living water that comes mysteriously. To be in the flow is to be alive and swept along by something outside ourselves, by the dynamic energy of creation itself.” She will be giving workshops for creative artists, writers, musicians and performers of all kinds about breaking through the fear of failure and censure into the freedom of creative flow.
Jacqueline PotterLiving Water Press is proud to present By Surf and by Stream, a remarkable book of 2-Minute Retreats to escape the turmoil and trouble of our times, available now.
From Jacqueline Potter, the nature-loving novelist, poet, storyteller and essayist whose work has been translated into five languages and sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide. She reveals her many passions and loves, her spiritual quest, joy in living, her vision of unity, wholeness and faith. In By Surf and By Stream, Illustrated Poems, Stories and Reflections, she tells new stories about her pioneer grandmother and her childhood of the 1930s and 40s at her grandparents’ farm on Spring River, with historic photos, pen-and-ink drawings and ten of Grandma’s favorite recipes.
Taken as a whole, By Surf and By Stream is a unique memoir composed of poems of many different forms, length and subjects, reflections and nonfiction stories, pen-and-ink illustrations and historic photos, maps and recipes.
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