A Personal Introduction

Forgive me for doing this backwards, for giving a personal introduction later rather than sooner.  For some reason, I don’t like to talk about myself. Please bear with me as I get over this tendency.  My personal introduction follows.  Thank you for your patience.

Being a coal miner’s daughter from Laing, West Virginia is as different from being a writer of children’s books as night is from day.  Yet, I am both.   I was content living a rough-hewn, invisible life in Laing in the early 1950’s. I was happy walking through tall meadow grasses.  I gladly spent hours peering at crawling bugs and watching big clouds sailing across perfect blue skies.

That all changed and my happy world was shaken when suddenly we packed up and without warning left the only place I ever remembered feeling safe.

The details of why Daddy forsook the coal mines for points north escape me.  I only know that I, along with the rest of our clan, gave up West Virginia’s wild beauty for the dust, grime and fearful noise of concrete city streets.

Years later, after starting my own family, I discovered the writer inside of me, first as a journalist in the Virgin Islands and later as a speechwriter for a local politician in Atlanta, Georgia.

As life shifted me from place to place and job to job, I finally settled down long enough to start the first of many drafts for my debut novel, The Children’s Kingdom.

I had no idea what I was doing; and to this day, I am stunned that I wrote a book that I feel can actually help children discover their personal treasury of gifts and talents and help uncover their purpose.  Even as I write this, I know this is huge.  It is more than I feel equipped to handle.  I don’t know if I am being presumptuous in thinking I have written something that children (and adults) will want to read and perhaps share with others.  I only know that I felt compelled to write and publish this book, even though I didn’t want to.

Moving forward, I still marvel that this little girl with the turned- up braids and happy smile grew up to be a storyteller, a writer of children’s books.  Although I have only completed one book so far, I know many more are inside of me pushing to get out.  At sixty-three I am looking forward to more adventures.  The little girl with the turned-up braids and big smile occasionally comes out and laughingly invites me to play—to once again walk through tall, grassy meadows and gaze with wonder at the clouds sailing against perfect blue skies.