About Amy
Amy Duckworth is a teacher, a painter, a sailor, and a storyteller. She believes in the power of sharing our stories to move forward in life. Amy grew up boating and worked as a sailing instructor and lifeguard in New England. She served as a special education teacher in Maryland, a YMCA preschool teacher, a cub scout den leader, school library volunteer and Scholastic book fair coordinator in Pennsylvania. Amy loves books for all ages and has her own vast collection of picture books! Amy received her bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education at the University of Vermont, where she wrote sorority curriculum while waiting for the cows to cross the road. She earned her M. Ed at Towson University and Phi Kappa Delta Honors with her thesis on the role of parent involvement to benefit student performance in the classroom. While teaching in Baltimore City, she captained the safety patrol program and an after-school tutoring program. Amy ran the Family Fun and Learning Night program that included meals and a creative lesson. Amy’s strengths include the effective planning and implementation of creative lessons. She taught students of all age groups for over thirty years during her teaching career.
Amy’s is working away at her debut prescriptive nonfiction book. It teaches her personal method for writing memoir called Uncapsize-Write Yourself! Amy’s book coaching business, Write Your Capsize Story, encourages novice writers to tell their story as a tool for moving forward through trauma, tragedy, addiction, divorse, illness, death or any troubling times using writing. She has helped four authors to write and publish their books to date. Amy will see four more books leave the safety of the writer’s harbor this summer and fall a collaborative memoir with her father. Her favorite coaching question is, “…and what else?” It always leaves room in the story boat for more story and keeps the conversation moving forward as we recover our stories.
Amy’s current and future book projects include a biography about her great grandfather, renowned ornithologist, A.C. Bent whose writing style of collecting field reports and compiling ordinary stories from ornithologists and ordinary people is much like her own writing process. Her life’s work centers on writing a picture book or early reader for each bird documented in all twenty-three of his encyclopedic books, The Life Histories of North American Birds, written for the Smithsonian Institute in the early to mid-1900’s. Publishing is in the family line, starting with Amy’s ancestor, opened Carter and Hendee Publishing in 1832 at the Old Corner Bookstore in Boston. Amy’s memoir will be released out to sea in 2027, if you are looking for more backstory on the elements of her mid-life capsize. Tack over to see her blog and read all about her daily adventures and how she attempts to uncapsize with each wave of uncertainty. Amy recently began her BLAHG to document and log her daily challenges. She uses her own experience along with other women to share their strength and hope because, “We all share the same lifeboat and have a boatload of life stories to share.” She shows through interviews and anecdotes how she and other women uncapsize life challenges by following the fourteen motions that pair with the standard small craft boat capsize-recovery method. Amy believes it is very possible to get back up and tack forward when knocked over. Amy’s monthly newsletter, One Particular Sailor focuses on a different prompt each month.
Amy is in AWE of the gift of life by keeping Art, Writing and Exercise of the mind, body, and spirit in her daily routine. Amy likes to photograph and paint what she sees and write stories using the ocean and boating as her backdrop. While landlocked at the Mason Dixon line, her no wind slow time includes gardening, golfing while avoiding getting pickled on the court one “kitchen dink” at a time. A visit to the sea includes reading on the beach, PleinAir painting and searching for jingle shells. She obsessively takes pictures of the green light shining in the cresting waves until the day she can set sail on her own dream boat. Once upon a time, she owned the hole in the water that floated her first sailboat, but sadly gave it up for marriage and motherhood. For now, Amy is captain of her mother ship that includes two adult sons, her husband of twenty-two years, a turtle named Jaws and a Shichon dog named Shark Finn, who really looks like Falcor, the flying dog in The Never-ending Story Movie.
I like to write about my experience from the classroom and on boats and use the uncapsize prompts to guide women to get through the tough situations. I look forward to the moment I hand my parents a hard copy of this book to put on their shelf along with my great grandfather’s books. The look of surprise and joy will come when I can announce the around the world book tour to my kids! I can’t wait to visit every bookstore in the country, or at least one in each state!
The Hope*Writers group suggests authors should write the book we need to write at this time and when we are ready to share all the HOT (honest, open, truth) sauce, those words will come. The higher power or spirit in this book will direct you like the wind. Amy snuck in a wee bit of woo-woo spirit, part of the mind, body, spirit triangle (like a sail) in there. The reader should feel that they can uncapsize and right themselves to alter their course without being hit by a boom of religion or having to walk the church plank.
Amy has joined flocks of many organizations to strengthen her writing skills that include SCBWI, James River Writers, National Association of Memoir Writers, Women in Publishing, Hope*Writers and the Ghostwriters Academy. She attends online conferences yearly, such as Women in Publishing and the Independent Publishers of New England. Amy takes courses with Jane Friedman and Amy Collins through Writers Digest University. She joined Hope*Entrepreneurs, Goins Enterprises, Punchy Books for community and skill building. She takes part in multiple critique groups across genres. Amy is also a member of DAR, TRI DELTA, WAG (Westport Art Group) and SCA (South Coast Artists) where she displays her art and photography in the summer.
You can see her ART HERE
Or find go back and look at her books Here