A trip to Red Feather Lakes Community Library

Last Wednesday afternoon I was allotted a whole hour to talk about writing at the Red Feather Lakes Community Library, in the foothills of Northern Colorado, about an hour from my house. Jeanette, the library lady, gave me free rein to talk about whatever I pleased. I brought along a few books—a couple of mine and several published by Penstemon Publications, aka my writing group of many years.

The drive into the hills was spectacular. There has been way more rain than usual in these parts and the countryside is various shades of luscious green.  High up you can see the charred trunks of trees burned in the High Park Fire of 2012 standing as dark sentinels on land now subject to flooding for lack of undergrowth.

Preparing this casual little talk gave me an opportunity to ponder my checkered writing life from a high school kid first enamored of the written word because of an English teacher in Philadelphia, then stymied by a journalism teacher in college and finally concluding that putting words on a page is something I gotta do regardless of the consequences. It’s been no way to earn a living, but it has and continues to bring me great pleasure.

I scrounged through my book shelves and found my masters thesis on western writer Dorothy Johnson. When I’d finished writing it, my husband called her up in Missoula, Montana and said, “My wife knows so much about you, I think you should meet her.” We flew to Missoula and I spent a whole day with a little lady, then in her 80s, who looked like she’d be right at home at a church bazaar and who had written A Man Called Horse and The Hanging Tree.

I remembered writing about my close group of college friends and bringing the Rev. Bob Geller’s story to life. More recently I’ve been doing middle school stories, Running Mates and Frisbee Dreams and a picture book, Muffin Magic. One of these days I’m going to revise White Shadow, the story of Janet Mondlane, “godmother of the (Mozambican) revolution.” I still think it is a story that needs to be told.

Meanwhile I’m having fun writing about the people in and around Wellington, Colorado who help make the world go round. I also spend some time writing about running for the Fort Collins Coloradoan and for Double Runner Magazine.

And I seem to be hooked on writing this blog every week. So it is with those of us who like to write—or maybe we just have to have some “homework” in our lives.