Your vision will become clear when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, wakens.
                                                                                                                                                                                                               ~ Carl Jung

                                                                                                                                     
 ABOUT BARBARA....

I am never sure what to say when someone asks me where I’m from. I was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, but that didn’t last two years. I grew up mostly in the Midwest. Once, in third grade, I attended three different schools. I finally landed in Texas, but my children were born in Kentucky. People ask if I was an Army brat. The question was uncomfortable because the moves came about as the result of family woes. I’m glad for them now, not the woes so much, but the moves. They taught me to adapt. They taught me that you carry your joy with you and you can unpack that first, no matter the circumstances. Uncrate the joy, then the books.

I have always loved reading. My sister taught me when she was seven and I was three. We’ve been reading together ever since. I remember almost the very moment when I first knew I wanted to write. I was in bed, flat on my belly, reading Wuthering Heights. I was eleven or so, I think, and very affected by the story. I remember looking up from the light falling over the book’s pages and saying to myself, I want to do this. I want to write so that people are engaged in the way that I am now. I want to give back this gift of enchantment, this sense of being transported. How does it happen, I wondered? That an entire world, vivid in every sense, can rise from a group of printed words? I guess it sounds odd in relation to how dark the story of Wuthering Heights is; it is odd to imagine that I was broken out in the gooseflesh of happiness at the dream of one day learning to write in just such a manner. The desire spread through me like champagne bubbles. I never forgot the sensation. It came back to me through all the hullabaloo of moving like vagabonds. It stayed with me through lots of different jobs, department store fashion model and salesgirl, college student, flight attendant, chairside dental assistant, then marriage in Texas followed by a next-day relocation to Kentucky and the births of two children.

The move to Kentucky added a focus I wasn’t aware of until I sat down to write my first novel. We lived on the grounds of a first-offender prison (my then-husband was a warden) in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Employees lived on a cleared rise of land, while the prison itself, which was more like a college campus, lay below. There were no cells. The inmates were housed in dormitories. Most of them were smart enough to know that if they escaped they would likely die of starvation or exposure before they were ever found. So usually they didn’t try. But they were part of our daily lives. They mowed the grass, fixed the cars, tinkered with the electricity and the plumbing and the most reliable of them babysat our children. I was introduced through that experience to the nature of crime and its procedures, legal and psychological, and the impact it had on ordinary people and regular family life. It was upfront, hands-on learning and when I sat down to write, that's what I wrote about. A guy who goes to prison. Injustice versus justice. What is it? Where's the line? What is the nature of forgiveness? Why is it sometimes so hard?

I can't imagine a life in which I wouldn't write any more than I can imagine a life where I wouldn't read. Both pastimes have provided me with a road-map, a set of tools, a way to navigate. They are like fixed points in the constantly evolving landscape of my life. As a writer I was frequently rejected but continued to persist. I may have had doubts, but that childhood vision never doubted and never left. Along the way, in related work, I have, and still do, freelance for clients from a variety of professions, everything from oil and gas to real estate, and interior and exterior design. I’ve been an editor at a small, literary press and raised two wonderful sons. And to this day, I work with a fabulous set of critique partners. And I write, garden and live with my adorable Himalayan rescue kitty, Jezebel, and feet firmly planted--for now anyway--in The Woodlands, Texas.
 

  
You must be willing to get rid of the life you planned so as to have the life you've been waiting for. ~ Joseph Campbell