Gaithersburg Book Festival (GBF) 2019
The GBF celebrated its 10th anniversary on the grounds of the City of Gaithersburg’s municipal buildings this past Saturday. It was a fine summery morning as two of my sisters from western NY and I set off for the short drive over the railroad tracks from Derwood. This was the fourth year that they had made the long drive down the day before in order for us to attend the festival together. We’d spent the previous evening reviewing the GBF’s schedule grid, identifying the authors we most wanted to hear from. Over 100 authors would be speaking at ten outdoor, covered pavilions over seven hourly time slots.
Testimony to Recovery
We went together for the first two presentation slots. Our first author was local writer and motivational speaker, Maria Leonard Olsen, whom we had heard two years earlier. Ms. Olsen is an accomplished Filipina-American woman whose previous book dealt with the challenges and joys of raising multi-cultural and multi-ethnic families. Her latest book, “Fifty for Fifty”, is about the challenges she faced entering her 50’s; challenges that included a divorce, overcoming alcohol problems (her own and her son’s), and a more existential issue regarding her personal identity and her right to define herself apart from the many social expectations she had taken on.
Ms. Olsen pointedly described the inner and outer chaos of her life at the time of her divorce and alcohol abuse. She slowly worked her way back to sobriety and a sense of purpose via 12-step recovery groups. Al-Anon in particular provided a sense of ongoing community support that helped her to discover her own “higher power” and to share her newfound serenity and purpose with others. She learned to become a better person, more accepting of herself and others without having to carry the many unnecessary burdens that she had falsely assumed.
The culmination of Ms. Olsen’s recovery work was the formulation of fifty desired projects and goals for addressing her mid-life crisis. Many of these involved risk-taking endeavors that she had always wanted to try but had held back from in fear. She bought her first motorcycle, sang solo in a karaoke bar, even set off for a months-long sojourn in a mountain village in Nepal. She came back from that trip with a deep sense of gratitude for all the things she had taken for granted: clean water, healthy food, a weather-proof home, friends and family. The 12-step message of gratitude, acceptance, and serenity became her daily practice and led ultimately to deep self-renewal and inner change.
From John’s Blog: A Venture in Creativity