Anne Shaw Heinrich relaxes at the Back in the Day Cafe on a visit to Cuba.
Anne Shaw Heinrich addresses small town values in her November 4 Small Talk column in the Dwight, Illinois The Paper. She makes the point that among all the dissension in life, that small towns still have that Mayberry sense about them. You can follow a link below to read Anne’s column.
Anne is a 1986 Cuba High School graduate and the daughter of Pat and Ramona Shaw of Cuba. A good student, Anne showed writing talents at an early age. In high school she was on the Backroads magazine staff.
Upon graduation in 1986, she received a Ronald Reagan Scholarship at Eureka College in Eureka, Illinois. After graduating with a major in English, she returned to Missouri and lived in St. Louis where she did PR work for Fontbonne College and freelance writing for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, as well as other publications.
Today, she is married with three energetic and talented kids and lives in her husband’s hometown of Dwight, Illinois, which is a Route 66 town on the railroad just like Cuba. She is a freelance writer working from home on articles, essays, and novels.
With three active kids involved in sports and other activities, time is at a premium for Anne. As she stated in an earlier Cuba Free Press article, “Big pockets of uninterrupted time are not plentiful in this house. If I hide, they just find me.”
Anne has published in Marlo Thomas’s collection of essays The Right Words at the Right Time and in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. She is currently polishing one novel and writing another.
Anne’s column Small Talk deals with many of the issues of family life with forbearance and humor. When reading Anne’s article on living in Dwight, I thought that some of the points that she writes about Dwight reminded me of Cuba, so I asked if we could share her column.
It can be found here. Dwight may not be Mayberry, but it sounds close. One of Anne’s friends on Facebook stated after reading her column, “I love Dwight because it is a place you can come home to even if you weren’t raised there.”
Give yourself a treat and read some of her Anne’s archived Small Talk articles too.
Anne, In the article, you mentioned that the kids get clapped in the first day of school. What do they do?
Our grade school does the neatest thing on the first day of school each year. All of the parents, and many grandparents, friends and others from the community line the halls on the first day of school and clap as the kids head in to start off the new year. It’s so cool.
And the 8th graders get clapped out of the building on their last day of school. The students and teachers and other staff members give them one final cheer as they leave the school for the last time. I love this!
I love that idea. I bet those kids have wide smiles on their faces.