User:Samjeff123/Mary Anne Phemister

Mary Anne Phemister (née Kowles; born June 23, 1942) is a Christian author and speaker.

BIOGRAPHY

She was born in Wuchow (now Wuzhou), Guangxi Province, South China, to missionary parents. Her family included two brothers and one sister, all born in China. By the time she was four years old her parents sent her off to the first of three boarding schools. The first was in Hong Kong where she lived at 23 Kent Road and attended Kowloon Junior School. After the communists took over China in 1949, she and her brother, Joel, returned to the United States for safekeeping with another missionary family while her parents with her two younger siblings sought exit permits to travel from their remote outpost in Jingxi to Hong Kong.

The family was reunited after eighteen months and lived in Buffalo, New York, awaiting their next assignment. Her parents were reassigned to assist Chinese churches in Haiphong, Vietnam, and later in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. While in the former Indo-China, Mary Anne and Joel attended the Dalat School in Dalat, Vietnam, a boarding school operated by her parents’ missionary organization. To finish high school in the United States, Mary Anne and her brother attended the third boarding school—Hampden DuBose Academy in Zellwood, Florida.

Mary Anne studied first at Houghton College and then earned a B.S. degree at Columbia University, School of Nursing. In New York City she met the pianist William Phemister. They married in 1964 and moved to Paris, France, her husband having received a Fulbright Grant. The couple, including a daughter born in Paris, returned to the United States in 1966 where her husband taught piano at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Mary Anne resumed her nursing career at the university hospital in Columbia. MO, and later in Wheaton, IL.

During the academic year 1984-85, she accompanied her Wheaton College professor husband on his sabbatical back to Paris where she studied massage therapy and soon qualified for certification in the American Massage Therapy Association. Using her professional training in nursing and massage therapy she opened Wheaton Massage Therapy in 1985. Sixteen years later she sold the thriving practice to one of her associates in order to devote more time to writing.

After taking writing classes at the local community college and with the encouragement of her teacher, Alice Snelgrove, she launched her writing career with her first book, 32 Wheaton Notables, that tells the stories of famous people who have lived in Wheaton, Illinois.

When not traveling with her husband to his concert performance dates, Mary Anne is a tutoring volunteer at the Community Outreach Center in Carol Stream, IL, and serves as a docent at the Marion E. Wade Center. The Wade Center is a research institution affiliated with Wheaton College devoted to the works of seven British authors: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, G. K. Chesterton, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and George MacDonald. This latter volunteer position led her to co-edit (with Andrew Lazo) Mere Christians: Inspiring Stories of Encounters with C.S. Lewis (Baker Publishing 2009). The Phemisters have lived in Wheaton for the past 38 years, participate in church and community activities and enjoy entering into the lives of their three grandchildren whenever they can.

BOOKS

•	32 Wheaton Notables: Their Stories and Where They Lived (2003) ISBN 1886372063

•	Mere Christians: Inspiring Stories of Encounters with C. S. Lewis, Andrew Lazo, co-editor (2009) ISBN 9780801071843

•	Lessons From a Broken Chopstick: a memoir of a peculiar childhood (2009) ISBN 9781934749623