‘Four Ordinary Women’ hope to inspire others

It all started with a letter.

A letter composed by two unlikely friends who wished to start a writing group with one extraordinary goal in mind: to publish a book that would inspire other women. Now, eight years later, the authors of “Four Ordinary Women: A Gathering at the Cedar Roe Library” are ready to share their precious project with the rest of the world.

It was Pat Antonopoulos, 70, of Parkville, and Patti Dickinson, 54, of Fairway, who penned the invitation sent to about a dozen women they handpicked from around the area.

Antonopoulos had been Dickinson’s son’s first-grade teacher. (He is now preparing to start college.) Through the years they became close — writing each other, sharing ideas and bonding over life’s lessons.

“One day we were talking and said, ‘Let’s do something more with this, let’s trade this in for a bigger experience,’ ” said the soft-spoken Antonopoulos. So the friends decided to create a writing group.

“And it was just great from the beginning,” Antonopoulos said.

Although a handful of women replied and attended the bimonthly meetings at the Roeland Park library over the years, it was Shawna Samuel, 46, and Jo Ann Stanley, 57, both of Westwood Hills, who stuck with Dickinson and Antonopoulos until the end.

Their book is a collection of nonfiction stories about life and relationships, good times and bad. The women enjoyed and supported one another, but their ultimate goal was to produce a book that would encourage other women to reach out and share their lives the way they were doing.

“We’re all very different people, and we’re all in different stages of our lives … and we aren’t in each other’s daily lives,” said Samuel, account vice president at Trozollo Communications Group. “It’s not like we were all best friends who saw each other every day.”

By keeping their relationship at arm’s length, they were able to work together more efficiently to create their finished product.

“It’s kind of like rooming with your high school friends in college — not very often it’s a good idea — and I think it was the same thing for us,” Dickinson said.

The leader of the pack is undoubtedly Dickinson, a superhero stay-at-home mom of eight and grandmother of four. She’s outspoken and determined and somehow always finds a way to squeeze in a blog post among days filled with activities and endless to-do lists.

“The more I blog, the better — the easier — it is for me to blog,” Dickinson said. “If I go three or four days between blogs, it’s really difficult for me to get traction again.”

Antonopoulos, 70, a mother of five and grandmother of four, is the historian of the group. She organized everything in the publishing phase and saved all the rejection letters. She, too, is remarkably handy with the blog, posting gentle and wise entries about the complexities and joys of life. She cherishes the connections the women made.

“It was freeing, and no matter what problem you came in with, you knew there would be eyes making eye contact with you, nods of the head, and … the remarks that you needed to hear,” Antonopoulos said. “It was wonderful.”

And then there’s Stanley, a worldly elementary school teacher with two daughters. Her eyes light up when she speaks of her travels — she has been all over South America and Europe, but also has explored the expansive terrain of her imagination.

“I love to travel and also to read,” Stanley said. “My first traveling was armchair traveling.”

Samuel is a hardworking and confident mother of two. She wavers back and forth about the book, happy to have a place to share her stories but anxious about revealing so much. She’s nervous about having her family read it.

“It’s a very mixed feeling for me,” Samuel said. “There’s an extreme feeling of vulnerability and judgment and a mixing of lives.”

The women wrote about the same topics at the same time. At the end of each meeting, the group would come to a consensus on the next topic, issues such as parenting, balance, friendship and death. They would come to the next meeting with what they had written. They imposed no length guidelines or other requirements. Whatever they came with, they read aloud to the group.

“Sometimes, it was an eight-page thing and sometimes it was a haiku,” Samuel joked.

If a member needed to vent or share an especially personal story, she could count on the nameless writing group (sometimes called “book club”) to listen.

“I think the process of reading them out loud to each other allowed others to enter your piece and feel the emotions with you,” Stanley said. “There was a tremendous connection.”

When they had collected enough material for a book, they worked together to cut out topics. They proofread but never edited down one another’s work.

They ended up with 23 themes, with four perspectives each. Some are lists or poems, others are lengthy anecdotes.

“These stories could be anyone’s story,” Dickinson said. “I think there’s a universal set of feelings people have … the same struggles, the same joys, the same disappointments.”

To reach Rachel Skybetter, call 816-234-4767 or send e-mail to rskybetter@kcstar.com.