We were nine years old, my cousin and I, and on a sunny June day in middle Georgia we perched on the cool marble steps of the Carnegie Library, books stacked beside us, waiting for my mother to come for us. We had joined the Summer Reading Club and wanted to fill our lists.

My cousin gazed back into the peaceful interior where the librarian presided at her high desk. “I’d like to become a librarian when I grow up,” she said.

“Not me.” I jumped up and dusted off my shorts as I saw my mother’s car approach. “I’d rather have adventures.”

Though adventure books were my reading of choice, real-life adventures were not easy to come by in rural Georgia. What else could I do? I scribbled my adventures on Blue Horse notebook paper. My heroines explored jungles, flew to outer space, found cures for diseases, or solved mysteries like Nancy Drew.

Small-town life flowed like the sluggish Oconee River as I grew into my teens. Adventures? Well, there was the occasional family trip to Florida to see the alligators or the mermaids at Weeki Watchee, or to North Carolina’s ruby mines to sift through handfuls of mud for gems—a far cry from King Solomon’s Mines.

On the home front, a chicken-wire Santa took different poses on our front lawn every year, and the Livestock Festival brought horse shows to town. Sometimes, even the circus came and pitched tents out in a nearby field.
When my parents’ friends came over to play bridge or have a cook-out, I passed tea and cookies and melted into the background, a fly on the wall. I heard all about a suspicious death, an unacknowledged child, bitter enmities, and political wheeling and dealing. At school, the talk was about fights, who liked who, hot-rodders who hadn’t made it around the curve on the Soperton Road.

Still, this was hometown life, not adventure. In middle school I wrote plays about swashbuckling pirates, of knights and ladies, and devoured books of faraway lands. In high school, I discovered I liked making people laugh, and wrote a humor column for the school paper. Still I yearned for adventures, or lacking that, writing about them.

I was encouraged only by my English teacher and I strove for high grades in that subject. I discovered e.e.cummings and declared my intention to become a poet, or at least a writer.

“Writers are a dime a dozen,” my father said. “Find a good husband,” said my mother. “With your ability you should become a doctor,” said my parents’ friends, “or maybe an architect.” Advice came from everywhere, none of it encouraging.

I got the idea maybe I could be a doctor and a writer, too. I enrolled in Emory, only to find half my class intent on pursuing the medical calling. After a year of intense competition for grades, I decided that I would not be the one to find a cure for cancer. From time to time I would write something, and then I would put it away.

All my college friends who wanted to write were hippies, and I was still too much a good Methodist girl to follow their lead. But still I yearned to rebel. I refused pot but learned Russian. I wrote secret poems.
Then I fell in love, and that was all the adventure I needed for a time. My ambition to write went underground as I went to graduate school, married, worked, and had children.

My cousin didn’t finished college. She left to get married. Then one day years later, after her children were in school, my cousin told me she was going back to college to finish her degree so that she could at last become a librarian.

That touched a chord in me, by then a stressed-out, overcommitted mother of three, with one special-needs child. I bought a pack of typing paper and dragged out my old Smith-Corona that skipped a key now and then.

Some time later, I had ninety pages of a bad novel, a few unstructured but sincere short stories, and the realization I needed both a computer and some instruction in craft.

By the time I’d pecked out that work, my cousin had already become a librarian in our home town library. It wasn’t the same Carnegie building with the marble steps where the librarian presided at her high desk those years ago, but a larger regional library.

I signed up for an evening class at Emory, bought my first computer from Radio Shack, and the next year was admitted to the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. My adventures had begun.

Now, years after I dragged out that Smith-Corona, I’ve had more adventures than I could have dreamed of there on the library steps, and I’m still having them.

Atlanta has been full of surprises for many years. I’ve met wonderful, creative people, I’ve found joy in work, and I’ve gone to places I’d never have gone otherwise.
I’ve had essays, book reviews, poems, and short stories published, and my novels are getting out there.

What do I write about? Mostly, my material is drawn from what I learned growing up in that town I thought was so dull—the people, the places, the quotidian things that make living both scary and worthwhile. Middle Georgia. Teens who got pregnant. Lunchroom fights. Mysterious deaths. Florida. North Carolina. Reptiles. Rubies.

And together, they add up to the biggest adventure of all—the one that takes place in the human heart.