Gutsy, down-to-earth and real: these are just a few adjectives that describe native St. Petersburg poet Maureen McDole.

Born into a family of carnies and fishermen, her genealogy dates back to 1929.

Her great-grandparents, Anna and George Hubbard, were members of a traveling carnival. They arrived in St. Petersburg the year of the Great Depression. With them was her grandfather, Wilson Hubbard.

Wilson Hubbard was a young entrepreneur. At the tender age of 18 he saved up enough money from selling fish to buy five rowboats and 40 cane fishing poles. From this investment he became “one of the greatest fishing guides of the Gulf beaches,” said McDole. In 1976 he opened the Friendly Fisherman seafood restaurant (named after one of his boats), which still operates today. He was also instrumental in the building of the public waterfront boardwalk along John’s Pass and the development of John’s Pass Village in the 1980s.

McDole, the oldest of four children, was an introspective child with deep thoughts and emotions. Without an outlet for her energy and questions about life, she began journaling as early as 11 years old to express her emotions. She would venture into her closet, where she set up an old typewriter and a map of the world to write.

“I had no one to talk to,” she said. “My parents did not engage me in conversation. My dad was busy with his carpentry and battling his own demons and my mom was raising four kids and dealing with an unhappy marriage, so I talked to myself by writing.”

As a 6th grader, she wrote a short story about a girl who killed herself, entered it in a contest, and won. She did not want to read her story in front of the entire school, so she played sick that day and her best friend read it for her.

“I don’t remember,” McDole said about how she came up with such a morbid story. “I do remember that my parents were going through a divorce and I was reading the book Sybil at the time. You would think that someone would ask about my home life after reading it, but no one did.”

She had no idea that she had the gift of writing.

After her parents divorced, McDole found herself raising her younger siblings, Alicia, Sam and Mary, and emotionally detached from her mother; not how she pictured her teenage years.

At age 18, McDole got into a bit of trouble with the law when she and some friends decided to climb onto the roof of an elementary school. Although no charges were filed, the punishment for the infraction was to write an apology to the school board. McDole’s apology was six pages long and applauded for talent.

Still, she had no idea that she had a gift to write, only seeing it as an outlet.

In 1995, McDole was accepted into the environmental studies program at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, N.C. After one year she returned to St. Petersburg due to a lack of funding. Not certain of what she wanted to do in life, she again turned to journaling her frustration and indecision.

While on hiatus from school, Maureen worked at her uncle’s marina, a bakery and other jobs.

In 2000, she returned to North Carolina, enrolling in Haywood Community College where she studied and taught pottery, receiving an Associate’s degree in 2002.

It was also during this time in Asheville that McDole got in touch with her raw emotions from childhood and began to heal. She married her childhood sweetheart Gabriel Garling, an artist, screen printer, and graphic designer, on August 17, 2002.

“He’s been by me through everything,” McDole said. “When our eyes met in art class I said to my friend, Brian, ‘He’s my angel’ (because his name was Gabriel). We dated so long because I wanted to be sure; I didn’t want to be my parents. He taught me how to love; he’s my soul mate.”

Being a native Floridian, McDole longed for the beaches, so they moved back to St. Petersburg. Home represented family for McDole and Garling.

McDole went back to working at her uncle’s marina, still feeling that something was missing.

“I was living in my head and my head was telling me that working in Uncle Mark’s shop was not it, I had a greater purpose,” she said.

Toiling at the marina day after day left McDole unfulfilled. She finally sat down to ask herself what it was that she wanted to do. She meditated and prayed about this for some time and at last it came to her: write a book.

McDole never considered herself a writer, just someone with an abundance of thoughts – deep thoughts – which she wrote down. As she began to research how to write a book she found that it would cost her $25 to enter a contest to get published. If she entered 10 contests, that would cost $250 and there was no guarantee that she would win any of the contests. She didn’t have that kind of money. She also had to consider what kind of book she wanted to write. Should it be about her childhood, her grandfather or life in general? She tried her hand at writing about all three and found it too time consuming and confining.

“My attention span is too short to try and write a story about my childhood or anything that has characters and plots,” she said. “Poetry is best suited for my temperament.”

With the decision made to do a book of poetry, McDole and Garling formed their own publishing company in 2006, Summerfolk Press, with her husband as the resident graphic designer.

From her journals written between the ages of 20 and 30, Maureen pulled all of her poems to compile her first book, Exploring My Options. Filled with whimsical reflections on growing up, living life and so much more, Maureen hopes that this first book will inspire others to look at their lives and break free of the things that bind.

Her second book, Longing for the Deep End, is a compilation of writings from her early 30’s about shedding small talk and shallowness and going for depth in conversation and thought. The book will debut Dec. 3, 2011, 4-6 p.m., at the Morean Arts Center, 719 Central Ave., St. Petersburg.

McDole received her degree in English literature from the University of South Florida St. Petersburg in December 2008 and is currently working on her third book of poetry.

“If you always do what interests you at least one person will be pleased.” –Katharine Hepburn

Visit Maureen McDole at http://maureenmcdole.com and view her column “Life in Poetry” at http://moxywomen.com, or at http://www.newrootsnews.org under The Studio Review. You can buy either of her books at http://summerfolkpress.com/?page_id=49.

SCARRED
From Exploring My Options

With every cell
of my body
I have lived
my own life,

with the deepest
of passion
and a good deal
of strife.

I have gone
to heaven
and hell
and back;

I have something
to tell-

life isn’t easy,
life is hard,

but we must try
to be open,
or permanently scarred.