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Jennifer Morrell

Wilmington

Emerging
Literature: Creative Nonfiction

By: Gail Obenreder

“Writing is painting with words, and I feel rewarded when I am able to get beyond stick figures, conveying something full-bodied.”

Jennifer Morrell has been “writing creatively my whole life,” just not in what she would term “a steady fashion.” Morrell is a law professor and public interest attorney, representing low-income veterans. But her undergraduate degree was in English, and prior to her current career she was a business writer and copy editor. It was while she was enrolled in law school that she took a non-credit writing course through Temple University, and “that is when I officially tried creative nonfiction for the first time.”

Her interest in writing began early on, when she wrote her first story in elementary school titled “Short Little Sally.” Morrell had pen pals for many years, even into adulthood, and she believes that “the time and effort I put into producing engaging and entertaining correspondence constituted my earliest attempts at creative nonfiction.”

Morrell was born in Wilmington and has lived there for the past fifteen years, but she grew up in Maryland (near Newark) and has moved in and out of Delaware over the years. She lived in Philadelphia (for law school), the Washington DC area (working for the USDA), and in New Jersey for a judicial clerkship.

1. Meeting – February 2004

I was in my last semester of law school at Temple University, living in a leaky studio apartment I adored with an oversized window overlooking an alleyway dumpster in Center City, Philadelphia. I’d grown accustomed to the woman who rifled through the garbage, and her daily visits and conversations with herself became as usual as the morning chatter of birds. I was a block and a half from Rittenhouse Square, a pretty park with wooden benches and old trees lining bits of green space.

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An avid reader since childhood, Morrell is inspired by “all the great books I read throughout each year.”  But she credits Marcia Booth (her AP English teacher at Elkton High School) with igniting her lifelong appreciation for literature. As Booth read aloud John Updike’s poem “The Great Scarf of Birds,” she held a scarf aloft to demonstrate the beauty of avian flight, something that created an indelible image.

Morrell’s current project is a forthright memoir about a type of domestic violence and child abuse called parental alienation. This is a form of emotional abuse “no less serious than physical abuse” that entails the “brainwashing of a child by one parent to despise their other parent.” Morrell seeks to craft “an engaging piece written simply and directly and without melodrama” and hopes that the work will provide “moments of delight – in terms of language and imagery – despite the heaviness of the topic.”

Morrell loves the outdoors, and she and her family spend “a significant amount of time” researching and planning their adventures, especially to national parks. She also enjoys working puzzles, finding that “the satisfaction and peace I feel when I lock a piece into place is the same feeling I get when I’ve nailed the right wording.”

As a busy lawyer she is challenged by finding the time to write, but she says that the Division’s award “gives me the permission to carve out space . . . to advance my memoir and all of my writing going forward.” Morrell immediately signed up for a course through the Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild, and she also plans to attend some professional retreats, knowing that “the Fellowship means that I should keep going.”

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