The Fourth Day of Christmas: Maureen Doallas

I think of Maureen Doallas as the Renaissance lady.

I met Maureen like many are met on the web – via blogs, comments and web sites. She operates a business called Transformational Threads, which licenses images of original fine art for rendering into embroidery “paintings,” also known as thread or needle paintings. She officially retired in 2007 from a job as writer and editor, but you wouldn’t know it from the sheer energy she exhibits when it comes to the arts and poetry.

She’s into all things art. She loves art, and you can see and experience her passion by reading her posts at her blog, Writing Without Paper. She’s introduced me and a lot of others to artists all over the United States. She keeps tracks of what’s going on with exhibitions, gallery openings, theatre, dance performances, concerts and movies, mostly in but not limited to the Washington, D.C., area, and she shares them on her blog in what she calls “All-Art Fridays.”

How she finds all the art-related videos on YouTube is beyond me, but when she posts one, it’s always worth watching.

And then there’s her poetry. Maureen has been writing poetry for a long time, has published some, and regularly posts her poems on her blog. She’s also a faithful contributor to our poetry jams on Twitter, which we publish at TweetSpeak Poetry. She writes beautiful words and lines – raising the bar for the rest of us. Take a look at the one she wrote for the One-Word-At-A-Time Blog Carnival on grief, or her three-part Christmas poem. Moving, simple, elegant.

She also does occasional interviews of people. And speaking from experience, she’s the most intelligent interviewer I’ve ever run across (and I’ve been interviewed by 2,000+ people in the course of my career). Likely reflecting her background as a researcher and writer, she spends an enormous amount of time researching her interview subjects, and then developing insightful, meaningful questions. I was blown away.

Maureen’s happily married (except, apparently, when it comes to fighting for space on bookshelves) and the mother of a son. She has four sisters and two brothers, and family is important to her – that comes through in all of her writings.

So read Maureen’s blog. Follow her on Twitter. She may have officially retired, but as she says on her blog site, “I’m not done yet, as you can see.” And you’ll be glad for it, too.

(Over at the High Calling Blogs, we’re celebrating the 12 days of Christmas by highlighting a blog or web site of someone besides ourselves during this season of Advent and Christmas.) (Which is what we should also be doing the other 353 days of the year.)