I don’t know what triggered my writing. I remember reading a lot. The words coming off the page like a scene in a place as I traveled the seas or rode a stallion across the desert. I must have been eleven or twelve when I wrote my first poem. I had to wake up from sleep to write it down because I didn’t want to lose the thought. It wasn’t a poem that a young, naive girl would write, but one a young woman might feel. That’s what it was. Feelings from reading the stories in my books.
These feelings were not feelings I had felt, but what I felt the characters in my books were feeling. Their struggles, their passions, their love. What each moment with their lover must have felt like. The words made me feel what they were feeling, and I couldn’t stop the words from flowing. I wrote dozens of them and composed them in journals to keep them safe.
The words meant everything to me. I hoped I would feel those words, those feelings someday. They were powerful and real to me, even though I had not felt them yet. My older sister once told me it amazed her, That I could write such words when I didn’t even know what they meant. It was like magic.
By the time I turned fifteen, I had a shelf full of journals with all my poetry in them. I had subscribed to Writer’s Digest magazine and was constantly searching for contests to enter my writings in. By this time, I had also begun writing short stories. The English teacher’s assignment of any writing thrilled me. I started writing in notebooks to keep up with the short stories and ideas.
Finally, the contest I was looking for showed up in my Writer’s Digest magazine. You could have up to five entries in the contest. Best of all, it was free. Most of the contests charged you for each poem. The winners would then take a portion of the entry fees. This one was different. No fees. Just enter to win. The organizers would publish the winners in a book of poems.
After an agonizing few months, the letter came. One of my five poems had won its place in “The World’s Greatest Contemporary Poets!” I could not believe it! I was only fifteen, and my words were about to be in print. I begged my mom to buy one so I could have a copy. No one was going to believe me. I keep that book on my shelf to this day. I even had a senior picture taken with it.
Once I got into high school, two things happened. The Yearbook Committee invited me to join, and I wrote for the local newspaper about our weekly events at school. Of course, I said I would! The name of the article for the Pine Bluffs Post was Pawnee’s Pride.
Pawnee School was a small school in the middle of northern Weld County, Colorado, in a small country town called Grover. It was ten miles from my home in Hereford. It was named by a businessman from Chicago because of all the Hereford cattle in the area in 1909. The year I graduated from high school, we had 105 students enrolled from kindergarten to twelfth grade. We had homecomings, proms, and lots of sports. I had plenty to write about.
My junior year in high school, I received a certificate from the School of Journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder. It was another reason I wanted to continue writing. Writing had become my outlet and my expression. It gave me a sense of accomplishment that no one could take away from me.
As the years passed, I submitted short stories to contests and even began a historical fiction book that got excellent reviews for pages in a writing contest. By this time, I was ten years into the military and married. Then 9/11 happened. The writing stopped.
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