Meet Tracee Garner

We were lucky to catch up with Tracee Garner recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Tracee, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

My resilience definitely comes from my father and mother. My mother left home at 17 years of age recruited then in her little Georgia town by the federal government agency in the 70’s and managed to stay there for 42 years. My dad was a Southern Baptist preacher with a small church he pastored for 27 years until he died unexpectedly in 2011. In those early 70’s he actually dropped out of college to come up North to be with my Mom. They got married the day after his ordination. They both were dedicated, unwavering type of faith-having, southern folks who moved North for the opportunities and really stepping out on faith at a time when others might have cautioned them NOT to take risks or leave the comforts of your home. Just that story alone was resilience. That’s what resilience takes, lots of faith. While I was diagnosed at two years old with a degenerative neuromuscular disease, I never saw their faith waver over helping me, over advocating for me at school, in my first attempts at employment settings, in getting my first modified vehicle that I would drive and being told no on almost every front throughout my life. They wouldn’t permit me to give up or feel sorry for myself. They taught me how to have faith and never give up. They are my own personal celebrities and I just look up to them. Everything I am, my drive, determination and resilience comes from them!

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

My name is Tracee Lydia Garner and I’m probably always talking about thinking about dreaming about and doing writing. Writing is life for me. During a really difficult time in my life when I was still in school my alma mater was a community college after I already failed at a four-year University I went to a smaller College in the area not far from my house. During that time I have such a hard time adapting and really completing my academic coursework. I grew depressed and lost my way a little bit and just could get through Math for Liberal Arts. That’s the supposed degree that those of us who are mathematically challenged are supposed to take. Despite being told in high school by really wonderful English teacher that I had Stellar writing abilities in college none of that seems to ring true when I had professor my choice of characters and why I was writing about people outside of experience. In short I would draw into myself begin writing more for myself and soon saw a contest online that would be life changing. I answered my work into the contest and I would end up winning the grand prize they would publish me in an anthology with three other writers give me an advance and a trip to New York to accept my award. It was in that time that I was so very validated about my capabilities as a writer and when I came back from that trip my grades improved exponentially I passed math rollable Arts and I went on to another four-year University to finish out my degree. I currently work full time for a nonprofit organization while I continue to write my 21 -so far- books as a passion project that I get to pursue, that I love to pursue, and that I do every single time I have the time. Even as an adult with a neuromuscular disease that causes chronic pain, the writing is always there for me; it has my back, it has me and I keep coming back to it no matter what. It’s rare to find something you truly love, and I love it so much. I am excited about projects that I’m working on not just romantic suspense which is my heart, but I hope to write a play, a stage adaptation of one of my books, I hope to pursue so many more genres than what I have already accomplished, and be truly limitless in what I get to do and what I get to work on maybe even a screen will play at some point in time, a made for tv movie like the ones I watched on Sunday nights as a child. One never knows but I’m excited about all of it!

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

The advice that I would give other folks who are early in their Journey no matter what it is, is to always have hope, and optimism. People who have this, always are striving to look on the bright side of even the most impossible circumstances. While you will go through so many things in life, so many disappointments, highs, lows and sometimes knock-you-down-bouts of grief, as long as you can keep a dose of optimism, and forward, upward thinking about where you’re going after this bout or test, you’ll always be able to get up. The motivational speakers talk about looking up; if you can look up, you can get up but find supporters, find your tribe, find people who when you’re feeling down, can speak to you, can motivate you and when they’re feeling down, YOU can pour into them, and motivate them. These types of outlooks and this type of support system will keep you from getting to a point of such lowliness that you feel you can’t get out of it. When you lose hope you lose everything. Never stop being a good friend and if you lack relationship skills seek to get advice and help or classes, self improvement tools, books and podcasts on improving your ability to build relationships. It is our interdependence in our connectedness that causes us to thrive and IF you lose that you can really lose yourself and become very despondent about life in general and you never want to get to that point.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

The book that played an important role in my development was something that I try to read, even if it’s only a couple chapters here and there, every single year. I have read the book several times. That book is called Write It Down, Make it happen by Henriette Anne Klauser. Before I discovered the book I was obviously already a writer since I’ve been a writer and have been published for more than 23 years currently. But I was writing fiction, yes that sometimes meant I lived vicariously through my characters, but never was I necessarily writing down things that I wanted to occur in MY life. Klauser’s book really talks about several short stories of people that wrote down things almost like a vision board but more so writing it in words, not pictures, and using that and then living your life and then one day coming back to it later to see how many of the things you wrote down into fruition. I have done this several years throughout my life. I’ve made vision boards, and wrote down detailed notes about what I wanted to do and what I wanted to happen in my life. I’ve revisited those writings some year or more later to not only be amazed at what I wrote but to see that it’s come true. Even smaller dreams that I’d forgotten were there on the page. True moments of WOW, I wrote down something and years later go back to it. The key is to keep the records to keep the journals and I wish I kept more of my journals as a child but I didn’t but it’s never too late to write down the things that you want to happen; the goals every year every quarter, even every month that you want to see come to being for your life and she even talks about sometimes where things aren’t going to come about that you’ve written. However disappointing that is, there remain in that even, many lessons to be had and that you should not be discouraged even when you don’t make the mark that you desired.

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Official Author Photo Credit: ASample Photography

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