Monday, June 06, 2005

Erica Miner and 'Tales From A Journaling Queen--A Journal of a Voyage"

Journaling has been my passion since I was a teenager. In the past two years since I published my journal-based novel, Travels With My Lovers, I have been inspiring people to journal via my lectures. My Journaling mission is the driving force behind my ‘Queendom.’ Wherever I go, I am asked to motivate people to express their inner thoughts and gain personal insight through Journaling.

My recent stint as a ‘special lecturer’ on Celebrity Cruise Lines was a voyage within a voyage: the journey from violinist to writer and lecturer and ‘Journaling Queen’. How did I get from that journey to this one? How did my life path lead me to a cruise ship in the Pacific? How did I morph from professional violinist to writer and lecturer? As my husband Christian and I gaze at the retreating skyline of San Diego, I contemplate this strange but wonderful journey of mine.

As a child of Russian immigrants, growing up in Detroit, it seemed natural for me to be drawn to the Arts. My mother had directed ballet in her native Odessa, and I started ballet when I was five. My father, a talented violin student in his youth, first put a violin in my hands when I was nine.

But in fact, I started out as a writer even before I ever touched a violin. When I was seven, the wise elders at my elementary school determined that I be placed in an after school Creative Writing Program. (In those days, there was actually money in school budgets for such things.) I remember plunging into writing with more passion than I had ever done with ballet, and my love for writing was thus fostered early on.

Later on when I was about to start high school my father, ever mindful of my artistic potential, gave me a small date book he had been given at work. Mind you, he was also a talented writer; but for some reason, he thought it important that I have it.

Even at the tender age of thirteen I realized that this date book could be my faithful companion through the perilous journey of adolescence. I promised myself to write it in everyday and did so with a passion. I poured out my heart into that little book: all my self-doubt, my hormone-driven angst, my ecstasy and confusion about my first boyfriend, my delight at the camaraderie of the three wonderful young girls who would become my friends for life - this all went into my daily journal, which I wrote in everyday until I left for college.

In the years following college I got married, had my two kids and began my professional career as a violinist with the Metropolitan Opera in New York. There was little time for Journaling, though I did manage a few pages now and then. But then the first bombshell dropped when my husband left me – for another man.

I was devastated. Suddenly I found myself single, with two little kids to raise and support while holding down a high-pressure job. I was so overwhelmed it was all I could do to keep myself from leaping out the window of my ninth-floor Manhattan apartment. I was indeed a ‘desperate housewife’ who desperately needed help.

But help came, in the form of a caring friend who one day handed me a leather-bound book with blank pages. I knew then what I had to do. Each night after coming home from the opera, picking up the kids from the babysitter and tucking them in, I curled up in bed with my journal. I spilled out my guts at the injustices of what I was suffering: being abandoned and heartbroken; having to fulfill, on my own, the complex needs of two school-age children; being exhausted from running back and forth from family to workplace, while being counseled not to ‘bring my problems to work.’

My journal was my best friend, my lifesaver. I survived. I moved to New Jersey, where my children could have a more humanizing environment. During summer breaks from the opera, when the kids were with their father, I fulfilled my lifelong dream of traveling to Europe, the place of my roots. My adventures were so intriguing that I journaled them, then put them aside. (After all, I was a musician, not a writer.) And when my children were older and less dependent on me I was lucky enough to meet my husband Christian, who gave me the love and support I had been lacking for so many years. I felt blessed in my new life.

Then I got clobbered with a second bombshell: a speeding motorist who crashed into me as I was returning home from work. After months of intensive physical therapy for injuries involving my neck, shoulder, hands and wrists, I began the gradual return to a normal work life. But within weeks of the grueling Met Opera schedule, the pain in my hands and wrists became unbearable; after a year and a half of immense effort, it became evident that I would have to give up my professional life as a violinist.

Again, as with the dissolution of my first marriage, I was devastated. I had to give up the Met, but I also knew I would need to find a creative outlet. I went back to my writing.

I became passionate about screenwriting, and after writing several screenplays and winning some awards, I thought it might be wise to live near L.A., where I could work regularly with my screenplay consultant, Ken Rotcop. Christian and I had both lost all patience with the brutal New York winters, but we couldn’t fathom actually living in Los Angeles proper, so San Diego seemed the perfect choice.

After I had finished my fifth screenplay, I had a sudden urge to write a novel. I remembered the journals I had written during my travels in Europe and proposed a storyline to Ken: a young mom who suddenly finds herself single when she learns a dark secret about her husband finds adventure in far-off lands and discovers what she wants – and deserves - from life. ‘Write it,’ declared Ken; and Travels With My Lovers was born.

But having fulfilled my desire to write and publish a novel, I had absolutely no clue that I would then have to promote my book, or how I would go about it. I began to network, getting out and meeting people who would steer me in the right direction. I attended seminars, such as Jack McClendon’s Encourage Mint series in Carlsbad, and I met Cynthia Brian, who coached me in the fine art of lecturing. I sent press releases to local newspapers and was invited to give talks for book clubs and women’s clubs. I took to lecturing effortlessly: my ‘inner performer’ was ecstatic.

Then Ken was asked to give lectures on cruise ships and offered to recommend me. ‘Travels With My Lovers is a perfect topic for that,’ he affirmed. I was not about to argue with that wisdom. I interviewed with a booking agency, and within a few weeks I found myself on a Celebrity Cruise to the Caribbean as a ‘a Special Interest Lecturer.’

It was a role I would never have imagined for myself, this journey within a journey, but it felt so natural. I lectured on my re-invention from violinist to novelist. I spoke of the joys of Journaling. I shared stories of ‘Opera Stars I Have Known.’ My post-cruise ratings were off the charts. Perhaps, I thought, this is really what I was born to do. But the Journaling lectures were by far the most popular, and I decided I would focus most on those. It was then that I began to feel like the ‘Journaling Queen.’

After the first cruise, I was soon booked for another to Bermuda, a place I had always dreamed of. Then came the opportunity to sail from home base, and Christian and I were off to the Mexican Riviera, another uncharted territory for us.

As soon as my husband Christian and I boarded the Mercury, bound for Mexico, we felt as if we had never left. After cruising as a lecturer on both the Celebrity Galaxy and Zenith in ’04, Celebrity Ships were beginning to feel like home away from home. The deck and floor plans of this vessel felt so familiar we could almost walk them in our sleep.

Within minutes of boarding, I already found myself ‘meeting and greeting’ people, a role that is both pleasurable and fascinating for me. As a lecturer, this is de rigueur - you are part of the ship’s ‘diplomatic corps.’ A ship is like a floating UN - so many languages being spoken at any given time, by passengers and staff. The constellation of Greek names among the ship’s crew read like a manifesto for the 2004 Athens Olympics.

We arrived at our cabin to find our steward waiting for us. A small, affable fellow, his name is Hopit, pronounced ‘Hobbit’ in Indonesia. How strange and wonderful to be ‘stewarded’ by a denizen of Middle Earth!

By the time we were settled in, our stomachs were growling. What is it about being on a ship that makes one ravenous from morning till night? Is it the constant motion, or the fact of food’s unremitting availability and presence - or the compulsion to satisfy an emotional need? These thoughts, as do all others, led me to Journaling, which is all about emotions. Unlike the chronicling of events set down in a diary, Journaling gives you that wonderful freedom of being able to express your emotions without fear of judgment. It’s possibly the best therapy that exists.

The more research I do on Journaling, the more I realize how many ‘issues’ are emotional - food, for example. I know too well how significantly food is related to feelings. When I was a violinist with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, ‘emotional eating’ was ubiquitous among Company members during long operas. Money is another emotional theme. How many of our habitual patterns with money relate to hang-ups from family experiences with parents and/or spouses and children? I love to discuss these points in my lectures and give suggestions on how to use those emotions to discover recurring patterns and find ways to deal with them.

In any case, I had this lecture-cruising down to a science by now: meeting with the Cruise Director and Assistant Director; connecting with my fellow lecturers; ‘meeting and greeting’ passengers, from lounges to pools and hot tubs to dining rooms and inviting them to hear me speak. But it was when I got up to talk to a room full of devotees who asked me to sign copies of my book afterwards that the queenly feelings really began to surface.

‘I’d given up Journaling, but you inspired me to begin again,’ one woman enthused.

‘I’ve been trying to motivate my teenage daughter to journal,’ another woman told me. ‘You’ve given me the tools to do that now.’

Reactions like that are what make me feel like a true Queen. Reactions like that make it all worthwhile. Mission accomplished.

I now had everything I needed to keep going, for what I came here for was to inspire people. But now I can do it in a different way than I had always imagined: not with the music from Verdi’s La Traviata but with the melodies of my own life journey.

And it is a journey that I am most privileged to continue. For the next several months, I will give talk and workshops and classes on Journaling, from my home base of San Diego to the wilds of Northern Michigan. My Queendom continues to expand. I feel very royal indeed.


© 2005, Erica Miner

Author of Travels With My Lovers
Fiction Prize Winner,
Direct from the Author Book AwardsTop-rated Lecturer,
Celebrity Cruise Lines
http://www.ericaminer.com/

http://www.queenpower.com
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