A LITTLE HISTORY
Why a misfit?
Writers have stories as much as they write them. We come from somewhere...
I was raised a farm girl.
Once upon a time, I had horses and could saddle up and brush down the assorted Quarter horses and misfit ponies that peopled the acreage where I grew up.
We were poor.
Largely stuck in the house with my sister, I became a voracious reader populating my mind with impossible fairy lands, Oz princesses, and equine science. Every month I would beg my mother to buy me Western Horseman magazine at the grocery store. I checked out many more books at one time than policy permitted from the regional library. Librarians can recognize a lonely child.
We moved off of the farm when I was fourteen or fifteen. We sold my mare and moved into the tiny town where I went to school. By then I was singing in choir and traveling to speech and debate events and science and math bowls. The farm faded as I focused on things of teenage importance. I dated. I came out to myself, my boyfriend at the time, and then my mother.
And then I flew on a plane into a city where not a single person knew me and went to college and kissed girls and saw the ocean.
And so on.
But there is still Ozark misfit in me deep down. It's in there. Somewhere.
Photograph courtesy Brown Dog Photography