Connections DEC 2014 | Page 14

Regina Garson Short Stories Regina's Facebook Regina's Twitter Long-time resident of Huntsville, Alabama, Regina Pickett Garson grew-up in central Alabama. Born in Birmingham, her family moved out to the country between Montevallo and Pea Ridge when she was three years old. Her childhood was spent playing the piano, tromping through the woods and hanging out with a pony named Sugar. Although Regina is a longtime writer and editor, her first creative love was in music. She was fluent at reading music long before she got a firm grasp of the thing about alphabets, reading, and words. With training in both the classics and gospel, by the time she got serious about writing, she had already spent a number of years as a church pianist and in other musical endeavors. Although she was slow getting started, when she learned to read, it opened up the universe to her and her life has been lived with a lifelong passion for learning, writing, and sharing of the written word. The hardest part about studying at the University of Alabama and Athens State University was narrowing down her choices as to what she could realistically manage to take. With degrees in Advertising/Communications, English, and Behavioral Science, her life has been a meshing of the creative, academics, hard science, high tech, and social issues. Among the first in her area to have her own "homepage," she is founder and publisher of MagicStream.org, a literary zine, which is now among the oldest continuously published self-help and wellness sites on the Internet. From computers to the Internet, her high tech involvements included a stint writing about rockets, and aerospace and space exploration were added to an already long list of interests and involvements. Although she has been very active and involved in a number of causes, and while almost everybody who knows her knows that Regina writes, her creative endeavors have frequently taken a back seat to the more practical, pragmatic and high tech concerns. Then, after a freak accident nearly claimed her life, Regina was confronted with a gnawing realization that she had not finished her own work, most especially her writing. Despite long lists of articles and bylines, most of her purely creative efforts were routinely packed away. Nonetheless, a time of great trauma is indeed a time of great change, and at the heart of it all is the soul of a storyteller. Journey is Regina's first release of her own purely creative efforts in a very long time. Make no mistake; she has a few of her own stories to tell and her creative spirit is