Newsletters, ARCs & Social Media Oh, My Marketing!
Welcome to the world of Mary Ellen Gambutti, Author,
Baby Scoop Era Adoptee, Grownup Air Force Brat,
Stroke Survivor.
I'm so glad you're here!
Words and music make up my earliest memories. English, writing, and spelling kept me interested through all my school transfers. I've kept up some form of word-stringing most years., letting go of my jottings, notes, lists, letters, essays, and poetry. And it all came crashing down when I was stricken with a brain hemorrhage in June of my fifty-eighth year. While recovering at home, after months of rehab, I began to take online writing courses through the community college. I found the craft of memoir and was captured by the beauty and meaning pouring from souls.
I attempted to record my experiences in essays on my new laptop, typing only with my left, unaffected hand, as I do to this day. Writing permitted me to take stock of my life-changing events and has continued to be therapeutic, even life-affirming.
My work has been published in many literary journals. My self-published collection of essays and vignettes is Permanent Home: A Memoir, available in e-book and softcover.
I recorded the personal events and experiences around my brain hemorrhage in Stroke Story: My Journey There and Back, and its sequel, Coming to Terms: My Journey Continues will be superseded by my e-book which compiles both books: Fortitude's Footing: Coming to Terms With Stroke, to be released any day now through Smashwords-Draft to Digital--and beyond.
What's got me really jazzed is the release of my coming-of-age memoir, I Must Have Wandered: An Adopted Air Force Daughter Recalls (Luminare Press, Eugene Oregon). It will launch on Amazon, and will be available "everywhere!" I hope you'll read--ARCs have been sent out!--and I welcome your impartial reviews upon release!
More than a memoir of adoption, I Must Have Wandered portrays the intersection of infant relinquishment in the post-WWII baby scoop era and the child's adoption into the transient life of a military officer.
It is a lyrical collage of letters, vignettes, and images, an epistolary journey of wondering and wandering, the known and unknown of my adopted life as an Air Force officer's daughter.
Coming in August!
"…a lyrical and descriptive glimpse into the coming of age experiences of an adopted military daughter...The complexity of the adoptee’s search for place and self in this world is universal and powerful." —Paige Adams Strickland, Author of Akin to the Truth and After the Truth.
As you can see, I've been on a marketing crash course lately! Sending out Advance Reader Copies (ARCs), newsletters, and on social networks daily. I so appreciate your interest and support! I'd love to hear from you. Please spread the word on your social spaces if my work appeals to you. The button below is to my website. If you'll leave your email, I'll keep you updated with my newsletters. I promise not to overdo it! Thank you!