About
Creative Process
Perhaps you have never heard of me because I am hiding out in the country in the middle of nowhere. Here is a bit of my story.
THE BURNING BUSH
Years fly by, while still working on The Ranch, (The Ranch Chronicles) my labor of love acquired a new urgency. At Christmas time, in our country farmhouse surrounded by family, lightning struck. It was during a winter rainstorm, two days after Christmas, and we all hoped for snow. We were in the kitchen; a pot of lentils cooked on the stove while we played games and told stories. A loud crack of thunder called us to attention. Then lightning hit with a bang like a gunshot. Out the window in the black night we saw a bright orange fire. Flames seemed like a fiery bush under the maple tree next to the propane tank. We all stared frozen. The men ran out with the garden hoses to try to stop the flames. My daughter called 911 and we were ordered to drop everything and evacuate. We grabbed the young children, donned our coats, and left for a neighbor’s house high on a hill. We watched from the front porch as the fire pierced the dark like a burning bush. Dreading it would catch the maple tree, then the cars, the propane tank would blow and then our 1880s wood farmhouse would be next. We held our collective breaths. It was forever before we heard the sirens in the distance and the firemen finally arrived.
All of our lives were spared that day like a miracle. The fire was being fed by a leak in the propane fuel line that had been struck by lightning. But miraculously nothing caught on fire. Not the line of cars 2 feet away, or even the maple tree that hovered above the flames.
We had all survived. The alternative defied imagining.
Life is short. I realized I must give up everything and finish The Ranch Chronicles. I felt as if, in telling the story, I was a spokesperson for The Earth.
BEAUTY IN THE ASHES
I still don’t want to dwell on the extensive problems with our current world picture but provide an alternative. In The Ranch, Native Americans join the group with livable, regenerative lifestyle solutions. This message is urgent.
Each person has the power to lead by example. Each person can do the right thing.
What kind of power can thrive in a small group?
I worked hard for two years in the effort to complete the novels. I quit my day job as they say and still, after many rounds with editors I hadn’t published the book.
Then lightning struck again.
We have a guesthouse, the place where I do most of my writing. Walnut Hill House sits on a hill with a commanding view. We filled it with antiques, paintings like a gallery, and vaulted space to write, or paint, or imagine. A place of dreams and visions. This time at midnight in August, lightning struck this beautiful house and burned it all the way to the ground.
There was nothing left but a pile of ashes. Somehow surviving amid all the ashes was a stack of designs that I had drawn for The Living City. The Living City will be a book that details the design of a regenerative city. This nonfiction architecture treatise was to be the sequel to The Ranch Chronicles. Amazingly, although charred and blackened, those designs were still intact. Beauty in the ashes.
Immediately, before the burned embers were even removed, before the land was cleared of the horrendous melted metal and debris, I completed the finishing touches and published both books.
The Ranch Chronicles is two books: Headwaters, and The Forgotten Tribe.