By Julie Muhlstein
Herald Columnist
Judith Nakken did better than win first prize in a first-ever writing contest.
Nakken, who lives in Tulalip, entered her book, “Confessions of a Martian Schoolgirl,” in the inaugural Reminisce magazine/LifeRich Publishing Memoir Contest. Reminisce is published by Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.
First and second prizes were awarded in the May contest, but the 79-year-old’s stories of girlhood in small-town South Dakota in the 1940s and ’50s didn’t win those. Nope, Nakken is the grand prize winner.
Her award included a publishing package for the book. LifeRich Publishing is a self-publishing arm of Reader’s Digest.
The recognition was hardly beginner’s luck. “I wrote from the time I could pick up a pen,” said Nakken, author of several other books.
“Three Point Shot,” her story of a Native American boy whose mother moves to Spokane after marrying a man who isn’t Indian, won an honorable mention in Writer’s Digest’s Young Adult Book Awards. Nakken has spoken to Marysville students who read “Three Point Shot” in middle school.
Another novel, “Sweet Grass Season,” also has a multicultural theme. Set on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Montana, it’s a love story involving a traditional Indian man and a white woman who comes to the reservation from Washington, D.C.
“Sweet Grass Season” is fiction, but Nakken, who is not Indian, borrowed from her own life. Her husband, 90-year-old Dale Nakken, is an Assiniboine Indian. They came to Tulalip from Montana. Dale Nakken’s son has a fencing business in Marysville.
“My husband is the model for the Indian man in ‘Sweet Grass Season,’” Nakken said. He is also a World War II veteran who served with the U.S. Navy in the Pacific.
For the stories shared in “Confessions of a Martian Schoolgirl,” Judith Nakken revisited painful, long-buried memories. The title came from her belief, as a very young child, that she must have been from some other world.
“I was just weird. I was left-handed, wall-eyed and precocious. I didn’t know why everybody wasn’t like me,” she said. “I decided my people were Martians, and they were coming to get me.”
Nakken said her mother “abandoned me when I was 4 and married my wicked stepfather.” In “Confessions of a Martian Schoolgirl,” she writes of being left with her grandmother in Osceola, a tiny South Dakota town. Things did not improve when her stepfather came back into her life. There were years of beatings, a bathroom with no door, and worse.
She escaped into books. Boys in the South Dakota town of Iroquois, where they had moved, called her “Brain.”
“I buried my nose in whatever I was reading,” she wrote.
Not knowing that her future life would bring a successful career in accounting and a long and happy marriage, Nakken wrote in “Confessions of a Martian Schoolgirl” how she rebelled, wasn’t allowed to graduate with her high school class, and eventually escaped a bad situation: “I settled. Shortly after my sixteenth birthday, in a maroon suit, I married an earthling.”
That marriage didn’t last.
Nakken will read from “Confessions of a Martian Schoolgirl” at 10:15 a.m. and 10:45 a.m. Monday at Everett’s Carl Gipson Senior Center, where she is part of the center’s Creative Writing Group.
Linda Bresee, of Snohomish, leads the group of about 20 writers who meet from 10 a.m.-noon on Fridays. They share their poetry, memoirs and fiction. Rather than formal critiques, Bresee said, “we praise each other to the sky.”
Nakken said she has been a writer forever, but after getting rejection slips in her 20s she stopped submitting her work for publication. When she retired in 2000, she worked up the courage to try again.
In her “Martian” days and later, Nakken said she was a “table-pounding atheist.” She’s now a Christian who volunteers at the Amen Christian Bookstore in Marysville.
“Here’s how I feel about my own writing: I put my heart on the page and feel so blessed when readers feel it,” Nakken said.
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; jmuhlstein@heraldnet.com.
Reading at senior center
J.R. Nakken will read from “Confessions of a Martian Schoolgirl” at 10:15 a.m. and 10:45 a.m. Monday at the Carl Gipson Senior Center, 3025 Lombard Ave., Everett. Nakken is a member of the senior center’s Creative Writing Group. “Confessions of a Martian Schoolgirl” is available at the Carl Gipson Senior Center gift shop, at Rainbow’s End 12 Step Shop in Everett, and by order at Amen Christian Bookstore in Marysville.
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