MotherJungle's Profile

Join Date:

2/13/2008

Pen Name: MotherJungle

• Location: Costa Rica
• Name: Susan Lutz
• Preferred language:
• School:
• About me:

  It didn’t matter if it was dark, Lutz found a way to read. On the long rides home from trips from her families Minnesota lake cabin, she’d huddle in the middle seat of the station wagon, steadying the flashlight to finish the last of another Nancy Drew mystery. Her love of reading drew her to  education where she explored a career in teaching mathematics and public speaking, a path seemingly far from a writer. But she always found herself involved in writing. She taught journalism and wrote a mathematics study guide to help students-at-risk prepare for basic exams. She then moved to teaching adults and helped create a curriculum designed to guide adult learners in everything from mathematics to reading comprehension. Her work with at-risk kids also continued as she received special training to teach entrepreneurship.
  
  Lutz left her Minnesota home in 1998 to live permanently in Costa Rica. She finally dug into a writing career. Soon after arriving in Costa Rica, she began a hosting, producing, and editing a short story program for an International radio station that broadcast from Costa Rica. Within the year, she began producing, editing, and hosting another program, an hour long interview show called A Woman’s Voice. She interviewed women from around the world on their personal and global struggles to find peace.
  
  After the birth of her first child, she began to work freelance for Costa Rica travel sites. She published in the English speaking newspaper, the Tico Times, and contributed a chapter to the book,  How to Buy Costa rica Real Estate Without Loosing Your Camisa.
  
  Her internationally read blog, MotherJungle, attracts readers from as far as Africa, Europe, and Canada. The almost daily writings resonate with a now, single mother’s struggle and triumphs to live a life connected to the true sense of joy, despite the challenges which include the news that her second child was born with Down Syndrome. The blog was selected by GlobalPost, an international website, as one of the top five blogs in Costa Rica, revealing stories and lessons that explore the real jungles of life.

• My claim to fame: Opening coconuts with a single bound.
  
  Ten or fifteen years ago if you would have asked me if I'd be a single mother of two children (one of them with special needs) living in Central America, I'd have chuckled at the silliness of it all.
  
  I've found paraise in Costa Rica, but it doesn't look like a postcard. It looks more like heartache, and vomit, and stiches, and holding on, and death, and life again.
  
  Years ago an astrologist told me I was an old soul, on the planet for the twelfth time. This was it - my last chance. So buck up or become worm food. On to the races!