Meet Lynn Slaughter

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lynn Slaughter. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lynn below.

Lynn, so great to have you on the platform and excited to have you share your wisdom with our community today. Communication skills often play a powerful role in our ability to be effective and so we’d love to hear about how you developed your communication skills.

I have always had a deep interest in other people—their ideas, concerns, and feelings. Listening carefully and with genuine interest and openness is a tremendous help in my ability to communicate with others. We all long to be heard, and I have always been eager to listen.

Of course, there are different types of communications. I was blessed to grow up in a family where books were abundant. I loved to read from an early age and was fortunate to attend schools where I was challenged to do a great deal of writing and research. Those experiences fed into developing my skills in written communications. In addition, with a background both in sociology and dance, I learned to tune in carefully to the expressive meaning and nuances of nonverbal communication.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I spent much of my professional life as a dancer and dance educator. While I was still dancing, I was also moonlighting as a freelancer, primarily writing feature articles for regional parenting magazines about the challenges of parenting teenagers, my favorite age group to work with. When age and injury led to my retirement from dance, I felt very sad about the loss of dance in my life and got this idea for a story about a young aspiring dancer with friendship and family problems. Even though I didn’t think I had the fiction gene, I plunged ahead anyhow, and that project became my first young adult novel, WHILE I DANCED. Working on the novel hooked me on writing fiction. I returned to school in my sixties to earn my MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University and have just kept going ever since. I’ve now written five published novels, four of which are young adult and one of which is an adult mystery. My sixth novel, MISSING MOM, is slated to come out in January of 2025. I feel so fortunate to have found a second career that I love very much.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

I think my empathy has helped my journey as a writer. I care deeply about my characters and their challenges, and I think that’s helped readers care about my characters as well. In my personal life, I believe my caring, concern, and empathy for my family members and friends has helped strengthen our loving connections.

I’ve always worked very hard at whatever I’ve pursued. A prodigious work ethic was modeled by my father, who truly found work very rewarding, and I have found tremendous meaning in my work as well.

My sense of humor has been a healing force in my life. I love to laugh, and laughter helps me take myself less seriously and cope with life’s inevitable ups and downs. I’ve been very fortunate because I married a man who is hilarious and keeps me laughing, even when everything that can possibly go wrong has.

Before we go, maybe you can tell us a bit about your parents and what you feel was the most impactful thing they did for you?

My mom was mentally ill and pretty much out of the picture, and I was raised primarily by my father. I loved and admired him very much. He grew up in abject poverty and managed to get an education and become a very successful publishing executive. His influence on my own pursuit of excellence has been huge.

However, I would have to say it was his lack of what I consider healthy parenting skills which has had the greatest impact on my journey. My dad did the best he could, but he simply wasn’t interested in really knowing or listening to the needs and feelings of any of his three daughters. He had very specific life scripts for each of us which had little to do with who we were or what we wanted. For example, he was so worried that I would pursue a career in dance (which of course I did) that I wasn’t allowed to take dance classes during my senior year of high school or apply to a college with a dance major. I hated growing up feeling angry, resentful, and discounted.

I’ve spent much of my life trying to do a better job of listening to my own children and to the hundreds of students I’ve worked with over the years. The pain of my own childhood experience has also certainly influenced themes that have appeared in my novels, in which characters struggle to overcome controlling and/or negative messages from parental figures and learn to assert their authentic identities and pursue their own paths. This has often involved creating intentional families of caring community, and mutual support when characters’ families of origin have been unwilling or unable to offer unconditional love and acceptance.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lynnslaughter.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lslaughter2

Image Credits

Headshot by Shannon L. Wells