Mary Long is a…

I have sat looking at that half of a sentence for so long and I’m not sure how to finish it.

This is the part where I’m supposed to trot out my accomplishments for you to read so you can be impressed. This is the very belief system that I am trying to eradicate, so I am having a hard time complying.

What I will tell you is that I am a born and raised Chicagoan and I love my city.

I am convicted that it is women who will heal this world and I believe in the power of women. I believe that when women shake loose of ingrained habits and beliefs about who we are, when we stop criticizing each other and start supporting each other, we will see the kind of movement that will truly change the world. I believe that women united is one of the most powerful forces in the universe and that power is needed now more than ever.

My journey to this point has not been straight. I have experienced periods of time when miracles were raining down on me, and periods where I was lost and in the desert without a compass. But I am doing my best.

This crooked journey has given me many experiences. For those of you who need them, here are some of the wonderful things I’ve experienced;

I am a mother and a writer, and my work can be found in various anthologies and magazine articles, as well as in the novels Grace and Remembering Heaven, which are available as ebooks on Amazon.

I have been a radio talk show host at WGN and WLS in Chicago, and WENY in New York.

I have been a women’s retreat leader and a speaker at various women’s groups.

I am the Founder of Herstory Network. I chose the name because one day I realized that even the name history has ‘his’ in it and is overwhelmingly about males. I was delighted to make up the word ‘herstory’ until I went online and discovered that I didn’t make it up at all. It was a term coined during the women’s movement in the 1960’s. I still love the name though, so I kept it.

This is the second launch of this website. It first launched in 2011 with many more categories that focused on the accomplishments of women past and present, but it caught a bug and went down a year and a half ago. I should write that I took this time off to focus more on writing the blog post section of the site, but that is mostly a lie. I was lost and in the desert again for quite awhile, and it’s only been in the past few months that the writing started coming and I decided to launch with the focus on the blog and daily inspirations. I will focus again on the amazing women throughout history that I love and admire sometime in the near future, but for now the blog feels right so that’s what I’m doing.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and for coming to my website. My goal is that through these writings we will find each other, gather our tribe and rethink the way women are to exist in this world. We will support each other and shake loose of outdated beliefs and rules that have kept us small and questioning ourselves. Because when the women unite…watch out! That’s when the magic begins…..