What Accidental Mentors is all about

My name is Annette Marquis, and I created Accidental Mentors: Inspirational Stories of Women Who Shaped My Life Without Even Trying because I believe that when women find courage from each other—courage to write and speak our truth, to go where we want to go and see what we want to see, to live how we want to live, and to leave the world better than when we found it, a kind of magic ensues.

​By supporting each other in our dreams, we can make the world a magical place for all women, and ultimately, for all people.

Accidental Mentors: Inspirational Stories of Women Who Shaped My Life Without Even Trying is a collection of micro-memoir stories about women who have influenced me in untold ways.

If you subscribe, you’ll receive all the stories. As a paid subscriber, you'll receive an additional newsletter per month focused on helping you honor your “accidental mentors” and a free signed copy of the book when it is published! Stay tuned for more information about my book project.

​I believe it is my responsibility to use my voice and be involved with the world around me in as many ways as I can. Writing is one way I can do that.​

​I work hard to write and publish stories, ideas, and content that matter. My dream is to have the resources—personal, financial, spiritual, and physical—to support my writing. If you share my dream, or any part of it, I invite you to come along. As a paid subscriber, you’ll make it possible for me to write and publish my writing, and I hope, you’ll be inspired and supported to do the same.

More about me

I am an author, public speaker, blogger, and community builder. I am the author of Resistance: A Memoir of Civil Disobedience in Maricopa County, and co-author of twenty-five software books, including Mastering Microsoft Office by Sybex/Wiley. My writing has appeared in anthologies, including The Women of Katrina: How Gender, Race, and Class Matter in an American Disaster, Struggling in Good Faith: LGBTQI Inclusion from 13 American Religious Perspectives, Coming Out in Faith, and Bless the Imperfect. Accidental Mentors: Inspirational Stories of Women Who Shaped My Life Without Even Trying is a serialized micro-memoir focused on gratitude for those women who have made me who I am.

I have a Master of Social Work degree from Boston University that I applied to a twenty-five-year career in chemical dependency treatment and crisis intervention services. In my later years, I received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Nonfiction from the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program, now associated with Lasell University in Newton, MA.

Writing is a vital tool in my activist and my how-to-live-my-life tool bag. Over the years, I’ve discovered that writing is a craft that can be learned but that great writing must be felt. I continue to study both craft and feeling.

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