While starting to write From Dust to Man in 1979, I opened a stained glass studio called Spinny’s Studios in Myrtle Beach, SC. I was one of the few women in town that owned their own successful business. Most women at that time were secretaries, teachers, nurses or homemakers which made me the odd duck out. There was a great conflict between women wanting to do more and men wanting women to stay in their “proper” place.  A few women were defending their right to work and others were defending their right to stay home. Many women found themselves in heated arguments with one female group resenting the other. I can’t tell you how many times I was told my children would suffer from my selfishness. But owning my own company didn’t interfere with spending time with my family, and my children seemed well-adjusted and happy.

Most men looked at my business as a hobby. “Isn’t that nice,” they would say in a condescending manner even though I had people collect my stained glass creations from all over the US. When women ask me to talk to their clubs, I wanted to talk about how to open their own business and they wanted to talk about their favorite recipes–frustrating.

A great antagonist in my life, my brother Roger bated my enthusiasm in writing my story, and said that men and women would never be equal and like it or not, men were superior. You can imagine I was boiling. He flippantly suggested that if I didn’t like the inequality, I could just write about killing off the males and sustain the women’s existence with the existing sperm banks today. I thought that was a good idea, but I didn’t want to kill off the males even though I did the deed in my book. I wanted to symbolically kill the madness between the sexes and start anew. Once males were extinct, I had to give the brainwashed male by generations of self-professed superiority over women and all species another chance. After all, centuries of male domination had created this creature that wanted to control everything. What if all this masculine history suddenly vanished?

That’s why I wrote my book From Dust to Man. At that point, everywhere I looked great inequality and discrimination between men and women existed, particularly in racial and gay issues. The Vietnam War was still in the minds of our people along with the pointless loss of lives and the overall damage that resulted from it. Like a true Aquarian, I longed for greater understanding between humans and animals and our environment. It wasn’t happening. That’s why I created a character in the 1980s that originally and unknowingly looked a lot like Bin Laden and started a war that would kill off all the males on the face of the earth and with a great deal of hope, brought one male child back in a societal sea of women. The journey to bring him to life and to understand his place in a hostile world is sobering when discrimination is switched and his existence is such a liability that could collapse an entire society.