When I wear my fascinator:

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I'm a great believer in happy endings.

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Sure, I know that true life endings only come about when you draw your last breath. However, a writer can place the ending of her story anywhere she chooses, and I choose to place my story endings at the place where the characters are at their happiest. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot can happen in the next hour, the next day, year, second, but that doesn’t take away from the bliss of the perfect NOW.

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I’m the mother of three so I know all about those fraught tomorrows -- the losses, the sorrows, the frustrations and angers, the less than perfect spouse. They are all a part of life. But so are the happy times, the times to be celebrated. There’s no more wonderful feeling in the world than the bliss of being in love unless it’s seeing the face of your newborn baby for the first time.

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So happy reading, everyone. May your NOW be full of joy, and treasured, even should it disappear tomorrow.

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When I wear my sunbonnet:

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Long ago, I earned an Interdisciplinary B.A. degree emphasizing history and literature. As kind of an afterthought but with the idea of actually earning a living with such a degree, I tacked on education certification - which turned out to be a good move when over the years I wound up teaching everything from pre-K to community college and adult ed. In between those two extremes, my teaching experience involved trying to get middle school students to take an interest in Texas history.

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I've also traveled extensively, including two stints with the Peace Corps, one to the Republic of the Philippines, the other more recently to the Republic of Armenia, stints focusing on working in the schools of these respective countries. The history of both these republics, past and present, is fascinating. Still, my pole star points to the U.S. West, specifically the Southwest, though The West in general exerts a pull like no other. As a seasonal park ranger with the National Park Service, I served at Fort Davis National Historic Site in Far West Texas and at Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site in Southeastern Colorado, both with living history programs. If those don’t stir the imagination juices, nothing will, so don’t forget that minor in literature that was never formally used inside a classroom.

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I am, and always will be, a prolific reader of both fact and fiction, contemporary and historical. Now I indulge my U.S. Western history fixation by writing short stories and articles, or by combining the two into a piece of creative non-fiction.

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