By James Windell
Johanna Nauraine is enjoying her writing success lately.
“This period of my life is my personal renaissance,” she commented recently during an interview in her South Haven apartment.
“I was just notified that my short fiction horror story placed among the top twenty out of three hundred contest submissions,” she says. “Then I was also notified that one of my creative nonfiction pieces is going to be published in the inaugural edition of Haymaker Literary Journal and one of my poems has been accepted for publication in an upcoming edition of Muse Pie Press.”
At 70, Johanna is no stranger to the vagaries of the writing business. After all, she’s been writing since she was 14. However, it was during her 30s that she began taking more seriously her writing talents. That was when she was attending a writing conference. “I met Nathan Smith, who is a poet and an award-winning teacher of writing. He took a real interest in my poetry. After that I went to a lot of writing workshops and I studied with Tim Dekin, who was a visiting professor of poetry at Northwestern.”
But Nauraine’s journey to a retirement career as a writer did not follow a traditional trajectory.
“Music was my first love,” she says. “I started singing in public when I was ten, performing in large concert halls and at school concerts. When I was eleven, I began composing music and singing with a band.” For five years she played the cello and later spent seven years studying piano.
“I was a voice major my first two years in college but eventually switched to Sociology, which morphed into studying Clinical Social Work at the University of Chicago,” she says.
In 1987, she launched a private psychotherapy practice in downtown Chicago, specializing in marital relationships, career coaching and small business consulting. While building a thriving practice as a psychotherapist, she continued taking voice lessons and performed regularly, including two one-woman shows at Davenport’s, a well-known cabaret club in Chicago.
After retiring from her private practice in 2011, Nauraine spent the next decade enjoying retirement and travelled the world. Among the places she visited were India, Australia, Croatia, Greece, Budapest and Prague.
In 2022, she launched a virtual practice specializing in premarital, marital therapy, divorce counseling, retirement planning and career coaching.
“When I’m not working,” she now says, “I spend time reading and working on short stories and novels.”
Both Nauraine and her brother were born in Puerto Rico when her parents were living there as Mennonite missionaries. “My father was East Indian and grew up in British Guiana,” she says, “and my mother was American and grew up Amish.” Although she attended two Mennonite colleges as an undergraduate student, she says that she left the Mennonite church a long time ago.
When asked if any of her ideas for short stories or novels come from her childhood as a Mennonite, she says that so far none of her writing has been related to that part of her childhood.
“All of my stories have to do with marriage or romantic relationships,” she says. “I’m fascinated by relationships. For me, practicing psychotherapy is like unraveling a mystery – how did these folks get to be this way. Writing gives me another opportunity to explore complex relationships. I’ve written four short stories about various kinds of couples. That’s mostly what my subject matter is. My ideas don’t come from my clients at all; they are more likely to be based in events and relationships in my personal life.”
Currently, Nauraine is working on two novels, a poetry collection, and more short stories. “I’m very happy with my writing now,” she says, “because it is much more sophisticated.”
Reflecting on her literary pursuits these days, she says: “I feel the best years of my life, creative and otherwise, are ahead of me.”
To find examples of her poetry, novels and short stories, go to Nauraine’s website at: https://www.johannanauraine.com and you can follow her on Facebook at facebook.com/authorjohannanauraine
