Can you tell us about your life and how you came to be a writer?
At the risk of sounding like a walking, talking cliché, I’ve been writing since the moment I first picked up a pencil. My parents infected all of their children with a love of reading. When my father was home—which was fairly seldom, since he was an Air Force fighter pilot during the Cold War era—he read aloud to us kids almost every day. Daddy didn’t just read—he became the characters. I still hear him and see him breathing life into “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” and “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” From an early age, I wanted to create that kind of enchantment.
While we were pre-teens, my sister and brothers and I wrote and performed skits about all sorts of fanciful things, from dragons to ghosts to cowboys and Indians. I wrote a couple of short plays that were produced by my fourth-grade class. (That teacher was a phenomenal man. He lived to encourage creativity in his students.) As an extra-credit project for sixth-grade English, I wrote a short story with a Comanche protagonist. A high-school English teacher to whom I will be eternally grateful took an interest in my awful, angsty teen poetry and fiction and encouraged me to submit work to the school’s literary journal…but I was much too insecure to tread that path.
I kept writing, though, for my own amusement. As an adult, I lost my ever-lovin’ mind and wandered into the field of journalism. I’ve written and edited news, columns, and features for the past thirty years. I’ve also ghost-written or edited several non-fiction books.
In the 1980s, I co-wrote a series of noir-ish detective parodies starring a dog. The small-market magazine that published them immediately went belly-up. Hm.
Kathleen Rice Adams
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