Let’s face it. It’s the risk takers who lead the exciting lives.

Sometimes, when faced with that pool of opportunity, the best thing to do is to just jump in and swim.

Writer and Langley resident Ann Medlock could be called a veritable cliff diver when it comes to her long career.

She has edited the Viet Nam Presse in Saigon, taught in Japan and the Congo, done freelance writing for such publications as Look magazine, The New York Times, The Journal of Commerce, Editor & Publisher, Working Woman, Lear’s and the New Age Journal among others, counseled major corporations on using media and has developed textbooks and edited the Children’s Express news service.

She has also worked as a speechwriter for United States political figures as well as, no kidding, the Aga Khan.

Voice for heroes

But one of Medlock’s biggest dives to date has to be what she does now.

In the 1980s, concerned that too few people were actively participating in this democracy, she launched the Giraffe Heroes Project to inspire people to stick their necks out for the common good.

In person, in print, on the air and online the project tells the stories of the most courageous and compassionate among us so as to inspire service in others.

She now directs that 25-year-old operation from an office in downtown Langley.

Medlock has been recognized countless times for her work.

She won the Caring Institute’s “Caring Award,” was a “Soul Guest” on Gary Zukav’s Web site and was named an education innovator by the National Endowment for the Arts. She’s been interviewed by Time, Parade, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, Good Morning America, Lifetime, and innumerable other broadcast and print outlets.

In short, the woman has climbed and conquered an impressive ladder of a career as a writer and organizer, even while living through the minefields of divorce and single parenting.

Different dive

With that astounding array of achievements behind her and having continued to take the risks of running a nonprofit organization based on writing the stories of people who are unflinchingly courageous and selfless in their service to others, Medlock still never pictured herself as a fiction writer.

She had, though, more than tried her hand at poetry.

In fact, she had been writing poems for a long time which she eventually published in “Arias, Riffs & Whispers, Words Written for Voices,” a book of 70 poems. And, most recently, she published a chapbook of more poems entitled, “Lyrics Waiting for Music.”

But, as it is for many writers, a novel was looming in the background of her mind.

Out of a writing group that started in her New York City apartment more than 30 years ago, Medlock pulled out the stories she had written based on two characters, Lee and Joe, which she had stashed away thinking them only exercises in a passing fancy for creative writing.

“I took them out of the box one day and began to look at them,” Medlock said.

Years and years of not seeing them gave her an editor’s perspective even for her own work.

“They had been cooled off enough for me to be objective and to see there was some good stuff there.”

Inspired by that elusive quality in the heroes that she had been writing about for so many years, Medlock decided it was time to muster some courage of her own and work on something personal.

“The Mermaid’s Tale, a Novel of Love, Fear & Misogyny,” was published by Dromnavarna Press in 2008.

Here is the story of Lee Palmer Pitt Montagna who tries to find her place in the 1960s and ’70s world of civil rights, feminism, the war on poverty, blended families, the Vietnam War, gurus and the eternal mystery between men and women.

The story came easily at times as the characters were already there and Medlock only had to open her heart and her ears to what they were telling her.

She used her experience living for years as an upper West Side New Yorker to add color and atmosphere, her life as a single-mom struggling to make a life for her family in the city and the people she met from all over the world to pepper the book with a montage of all their quirks and qualities to become the characters in the book.

“Fiction is fun because you don’t have to worry about accuracy like a memoir,” Medlock said.

“When it’s going well it’s like you are on the curl of a wave and everything you’re writing down feels right. There’s hardly any effort.”

Although Medlock said about 100 pages or so didn’t make it into the 400-page novel thanks to her sharp editor, it took years of writing on the weekends to get through it. There were periods of doubt and she would walk away for a while only to come back shortly thereafter for missing the company of her characters.

Woman drowning

In the story, Lee struggles through a life turned upside down by a husband who dominates her. Lee, unable to make the choices that would be the best for her own health and happiness, is trapped like so many damsels in the fractured fairy tales of real life.

“I kept yelling at her not to move to New York with him,” Medlock said of her experience while writing.

Lee, an educated single mom, gives up an opportunity for a good job in Washington, D.C. to go to New York with Joe who has cast a kind of “prince-on-a-white-horse” spell on her.

“Lee is a woman of her time, with no confidence in her own judgement and with no ability to assess what is right for her,” the author said of her main character.

Medlock said it is a quality that she realized is not restricted to women of the past century.

“I worry a lot about women still,” Medlock said.

“We are programmed to judge ourselves. I wrote this book so younger women might see not to trust what is put to them in the culture; to make their own choices rather than letting society tell them who to be.”

But it was men, too, who were on Medlock’s mind through much of the book.

She said she was impressed by the reactions she received from men who read the book even though she knows that women are more likely in general to read novels.

“I hope men read it just to see what scripts they are running on and how embedded these notions are about women and who they are.”

Joe is an attractive, successful man who Lee sees as her protector, Medlock said. But the irony is that he is the most dangerous person in her life.

She just did it

By the book’s end the symbolism of the mermaid becomes clear and all similarities to the traditional fairy tale fall away.

With the character of Lee, as with her own foray into the world of fiction, the author gives us a glimpse of a transformation and the excitement of a dive into new waters, risks and all.

“The Mermaid’s Tale” is available at Moonraker Books in Langley.

To visit Medlock’s Web site for more interesting explorations on the author’s life and work, Click here.