Speaker: Nancy Rue
Topic: Doing What You're Meant to Do We sometimes get so focused on what we think we have to do to make a living or raise a family or merely keep our heads above the proverbial water, we don’t pay attention to what we were meant to do – until we find ourselves burned out or suffering from a stress-related illness or dreaming of running away. Why wait until then? If we’re meant to do it, we’re meant to do it now. We’ll talk about knowing what that is and taking the risk to let it happen.
About the speaker: Because her name is easy to mistake with that of a certain blonde amateur sleuth in a little blue roadster, Nancy Rue often finds more name recognition than she expects. This is somehow fitting, because it was partly her childhood admiration for Nancy Drew – in the days when she read everything she could get her hands on – that made her dream of becoming a writer. At first, daunted by the criticism of well-meaning high school English teachers, Rue majored in English at Florida’s Stetson University in order to become a high school English teacher herself. “There was so much damage I wanted to make up for in my own classroom,” she says. She earned her master’s degree in education at the College of William and Mary and returned to college at the University of Nevada, Reno, after eleven year of teaching English, to earn a degree in theatre. She and husband Jim founded Nevada Children’s Theatre, and Nancy taught high school theatre for five years. Rue’s teaching experience fanned her dream of writing as she attempted to make writing more relevant and fun for her students. Every assignment they had to do, she herself did as well, and both her love for writing and her confidence that she could be good at it grew. In 1980, Rue took a leave of absence from teaching and took on writing as a nine-to-five job. Although it quickly became apparent that she could starve to death that way, that didn’t stop her: she spent fifteen years getting up at 4:00 a.m. to write before going off to teach school, until she was finally able to pursue freelance writing full-time in 1995. “I am living a God-directed life,” says the author: “doing what I was meant to do, what I love to, what allows me to give what I’ve been given. I spend as much of my time teaching, filling my well, hanging out with the people I love, as I do writing, and that has made all the difference. Rue has become a successful, best-selling author of books for ‘tweens and adults. Over her career she’s written more than 100 books. For a complete list of adult fiction, click here (link to adult books). For ‘tween books, click here (‘tween link). Nancy travels the country speaking and teaching at schools, churches, home school groups, and for groups of ‘tween girls and their moms. She lives in Tennessee with her husband, Jim. Their daughter, Marijean, and son-in-law, Brian, live in nearby Nashville. The Rues’ two Lab puppies share (and eat) Jim and Nancy’s home.