Jacqueline Potter is a writer whose work has been
translated into five languages and sold more than 100,000
copies worldwide. She is the author of two novels under a pen name,
personal and historical essays, profiles, opinion pieces, meditations,
reflections and poetry which have appeared in numerous publications and books.

She has been writing poetry since she was “hooked” in third grade at P.S. 101 Forest Hills, Long Island,

N.Y. Her family had just moved there from Kansas City, Mo. The next year they moved to New York City’s Upper West Side, and all spent summer with her grandparents on their Southwest Missouri farm. In By Surf and By Stream, she tells stories about her childhood years in the 1930s and 40s at that Farm on Spring River and about her pioneer “Pennsylvania Dutch” grandmother (1881-1976) and includes ten of her grandmother’s heirloom recipes.

“My love affair with the seashore began on the East Coast” she says, “and only intensified when I lived in Long Beach, California, and the San Francisco Bay area. That love affair goes on, no matter where I live.” In the early 1970s, she began writing “beach poems” which often appeared in The Islander magazine at Hilton Head Island, S.C. and became the starting point for By Surf and By Stream. For the last twenty years, the dramatic coast and islands of the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii also have inspired her poems and reflections.

“The best vacation retreats for our family have always been connected with water,” she says, “boating, swimming, water skiing, fishing or sailing on Missouri’s Table Rock or Stockton Lake, sometimes Bull Shoals Lake in Arkansas or Grand Lake in Oklahoma, renting a house on the coast for a couple of weeks, or floating by canoe on our favorite Ozarks creeks and rivers, of which there are many noteworthy ones, especially the Buffalo River in Northern Arkansas, where we slept in tents on the gravel bars and cooked over a campfire.”

“My Southwest Missouri roots grew long and deep and kept pulling me back, no matter how much I loved other places,” she says. In her personal essay Migration Patterns in Echoes of the Ozarks, Vol. II, © 2006 Ozarks Writers League from AWOC.COM Publishing, she wrote “Spring River called me back, Carthage called me back, the Ozarks called me back, no matter where I lived.”

“Everyone knows water is essential to life, but for me, water is symbolic of creative flow and inspiration. The living water that comes mysteriously. To be in the flow is to be alive and swept along by something outside ourselves, by the dynamic energy of creation itself.” She will be giving workshops for creative artists, writers, musicians and performers of all kinds about breaking through the fear of failure and censure into the freedom of creative flow.

With a great zest for life, she enjoys wildflowers, native flowering trees, perennial, bulb, rose and herb gardening, family and friends, food and cooking, art, music, live performances, film, reading, travel, Tai Chi, practicing Yoga when possible, discovering the truth and learning how to live in harmony with others and the universe.

A nature lover devoted to her four-generation family, she lives with her artist husband of many years on a high bluff overlooking a creek in southern Missouri, where they take pleasure in watching changing seasons and abundant wildlife.