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"Cooper's Heart"

(Oprah Daily, July, 2022
 "What My Year of Solo Travel
at 64 Taught Me. "

(Daily Beast, October 2018)
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"I Drove Cross-Country In Search of Proof Of The Divine.  I Found It In The Place I Least Expected.

(Huffington Post, April 2024 )
"How I Learned to Love My Granddaughter Without Fear"

(TIME, May 2024
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Subscribe to my Substack newsletter, "Mystery, Memoir, & Meaning," and join the journey. 

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Bio

About Rebecca

If you take a ten-year-old kid, put her on an 80-acre farm in northeastern Ohio, and let her run wild, the odds of ending up with a writer are pretty good. As it turns out, you might also get a spiritual seeker.

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In 2017, after losing the faith that had sustained her through unimaginable loss, Rebecca, a former Lutheran pastor, set out on a cross-country pilgrimage. She’s written a memoir about her journey, Chasing Light: One Van, Two Dogs, and an Ex-Pastor's Search for the Divine and is currently querying agents in pursuit of representation. She writes essays, flash nonfiction, and loves the mystery novel genre so much that she's writing one. Check it out over on Mystery, Memoir, and Meaning.
 

Rebecca earned a BA from Wittenberg University, an M.Div. from Trinity Lutheran Seminary, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. She’s taught at Appalachian State University, worked for a domestic violence and rape crisis agency, and in another life served three Lutheran congregations. 

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She currently divides her time between North Carolina’s beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains and the Carolina Coast. 

Her Writing

Rebecca Gummere Oprah Book

Rebecca's essay, “Cooper’s Heart,” published in the April, 2017 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, was name Best Essay of 2017 at the Hearst Magazines Editorial Excellence Awards and was selected for inclusion in O's Little Guide to the Big Questions (Flatiron Books, 2018). The essay was also reprinted in Oprah Daily in July, 2022. 

 

Rebecca’s work has appeared in TIME,  Five Minutes,  The Razor, the New York Times Tiny Love StoriesHuffington PostO, The Oprah Magazine, The Daily BeastPithead Chapel, the Christian Science MonitorCrack the SpineThe Gettysburg ReviewThe Rumpus, the New South Journal, the Waccamaw Journal, and on the Brevity blog. 

 

Her essay, "Pilgrimage," was named a finalist in The Masters Review Anthology Contest, Vol. VII, and appears in the anthology released Fall, 2018. 

 

She is a two-time Pushcart nominee and has been awarded three North Carolina Regional Artist Project Grants (2013, 2015, and 2018). She has also attended residencies at  Dairy Hollow, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), Ragdale, and was selected to receive a 2017-2018 North Carolina Artist Fellowship.

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Rebecca's essay, "The Departure," which appeared in the Summer, 2012 issue of The Gettysburg Review, has been reprinted by Redux Literary Journal.

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ElizabethBrockwayTheDailyBeast Rebecca G
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"Rupture" 

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square knot Pithead Chapel

"The Transit of Venus"

"The Departure"

published work
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