Parental Wings and Fowl Play by Sasscer Hill and Judy Hogan

Sasscer Hill and I became friends at the Malice Domestic Convention in 2011, during the awards banquet.  Sasscer was up for an Agatha Best First Novel Award, and I was a finalist that year in the Malice Domestic First Best Traditional Novel contest sponsored by St. Martin’s Press.  Since I hadn’t heard anything, I was sure I would not get the award, but two people right before the banquet had suggested I still might, so we were both nervous.  I had chosen to sit at her table, because I thought she should win Best First Novel.  I still think so. 

            People become closer when they go through difficulties together.  The suspense leading up to the announcements and our shared disappointment at not winning enhanced our connection, not to mention that we found out we both loved chickens.  We have different lifestyles (Sasscer is a horse person, raises horses, and her novels are about horse-racing; I am a small farmer, have done lots of organizing, was a published poet before venturing into mystery novels which feature a group of community activists), but we appreciate each other’s way of life.  We did our chat here a little differently, rather than back and forth.  Here is mine.  Then comes Sasscer’s.  We hope you’ll read our mysteries!  Our websites and blogs are at the end of each piece.

Judy:

I’m taking up Kaye Barley’s challenge to tell about our best friend experiences in childhood, especially the ones in which we felt betrayed by that friend.  I’ve realized, with a shock, that my mother was my best friend growing up.  She did betray me, not once but several times.  She had no business making me her best friend, but she was often lonely.  In her role as minister’s wife, she was convinced that she shouldn’t have a best friend in the congregation, and she met few other people she had anything in common with.  For her that meant sharing ideas in a liberal religious and political context.  My father had no problem having special friends who attended our church, but she did.  So I was selected.  My father, she later told me, had only really talked to her before they married and again, not long before he died of cancer.  She said she learned what he was thinking about in his Sunday sermons.

            Mother was the one who educated me about social justice issues, who explained sex to me.  “When Uncle Dick comes back from the Army, maybe Aunt Ruth will have another baby.”

            “Why does Uncle Dick have to come back?”  I was six, and she then read me a book about the birds and the bees.

            I was four when I learned that, if I made some excuse about not being able to sleep, she’d hold and rock me, and we’d talk about babies, my favorite subject.  She never refused.  When I was ten and older, we’d talk about child-rearing, religion, politics, the neighbors. 

            In 1948, when I was eleven, we lay in her bed late at night listening to the Democratic Convention.  She explained the significance of the Dixiecrats walking out of that convention (rejecting an equal rights plank the party had).  We were the only people in our Jacksonville, Florida neighborhood and I was the only one at school, who wanted Truman to win.  That was the year the newspaper headlines were already printed that Dewey had won, and then he didn’t.  I was so happy.

            She told me there was an abortion doctor operating next door in a big house that rented out rooms and small apartments.  From then on that house took on an evil aura for me.  Once she confided that we had only $15 in the bank until Daddy got paid.  This tickled me, and I told Cletus, the girl across the street.  Then I learned I wasn’t supposed to talk about that kind of news.  She got pregnant early in 1947, when I was nine and a half, and she shared her joy in that.  I knew she was determined to breast-feed this baby, and I saw her massaging her breasts daily.  My younger sister had been born by Caesarian, but Mother hoped to have a normal birth, and she did.  The first question I asked my father when he came back from the hospital to tell us we had a baby brother was: “Can she breast-feed him?”

            I told Mother everything, and she shared a lot with me, more than was wise.  She turned me into a kind of mother in her need.

            So when, at age thirteen, I didn’t want to wear lipstick, though my eighth grade classmates did, and my school friend Betty Kaye teased me about it–mid-year--I was very hurt when Mother joined in the teasing.  It should have been my decision, I felt then, but I did start wearing lipstick.  Maybe that was why I stopped altogether some years later.

            The most devastating thing she did in my early adolescence was to suggest I not go to a dance with my first boyfriend, Wesley, because he was “too short.”  Wesley became good friends in seventh grade, and he brought me a fresh gardenia every day when they were in bloom.  We loved each other.  We held hands.  We hadn’t even kissed.  We were both sensitive and artistic.  He was a gifted soprano, later a tenor.  I had already decided to be a writer.  It’s common knowledge that girls get their height first, but that didn’t sway Mother.  I told Wesley I couldn’t go to the dance.  I don’t know why Mother did that, but maybe she was afraid of my becoming sexual.  Not much danger at my age thirteen.  Or was it because Wesley and I loved each other so much?  Her idea was for me to date Michael O., who was as tall as me and also had red hair, like Wesley.  She even encouraged me to give a party later that eighth grade year, but Wesley was not invited.  I tried to like Michael, but there was no “connection” there.

            I was in New York City the summer after I finished college, and I met Wesley on a subway train.  He was taller than I.  I had a boyfriend by then, but I was happy to see him.  We were both happy about meeting, but we didn’t exchange addresses.

            Still later, in 2002, I found him via an internet search and wrote him a letter.  He called me up.  He was still in Florida, had married the same woman twice, and they had three grown daughters.  Our lives had gone very differently, but we write to each other now and then.  The basic “connection” is still there.  We changed over time.  He was a social worker and had an antique shop.  I involved myself in small press organizing and various kinds of teaching, writing, of course, and now farming.  He’s very laid back, procrastinates answering my letters and is in poorer health than I.  I’m active, always doing something, in very good health, happier, I’d say.  One does wonder sometimes.  But there aren’t any answers to “what if?”

            Had I had a different mother, my intellect and creativity, my social activism and tendency to help other people might have been stymied rather than cultivated, and Mother, because of her loneliness and my responsiveness, was the cultivator.

            What finally divided us and led to my becoming my own person was my falling in love with John Crawley, a young, thoughtful, wise black man from Virginia.  I was nineteen, and he was twenty-one.  We met at a Y Conference in Ohio.  When I came home afterwards, I told Mother I was in love with him, and she reacted with shock and fear: “What about the children?”  I was hurt, again, and only my father’s more careful response, telling me such a decision as to who I married was up to me, allowed me the freedom I was ready to claim, regardless.

            Mother didn’t remember her first negative reaction, but the memory is burned into my consciousness.  Our first open disagreement.  In the 1940s and 50s she had worked for equal rights, and the great bugaboo was intermarriage.  “Negroes don’t want intermarriage.  They want to be treated equally,” she’d say.  Maybe so, but I’d met a black man a lot like me, already a risk-taker, and we were very similar, in our essential natures.  He was very tall, but not a basketball player.  He studied philosophy and wanted to read the modern Christian theologians that my father read: Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, whose books he couldn’t get from the Virginia State library.

            Mother’s initial reaction drove me away, drove a wedge between us.  I was no longer the perfectly behaved daughter who listened to all her advice and told her all my problems.  I never did, after that, fully trust her.

            Later, when I met John’s mother, after he died, and told her of my mother’s reaction to our love and how she and I had been alienated from each other for years, though in my 50s, in our family therapy, I was told: “Go love your mother.”  I tried to.  I eventually could accept her human limitations as well as my own.  Mrs. Crawley encouraged me also to forgive Mother and shared stories of how her mother had hurt her feelings, but she’d learned to forgive her.

            Forgiving our parents is essential to our own well-being and never easy, I think.  Mother is dead now, and I often think of how much my gifts and interests, my mind and imagination, were first nourished by her.

***

            Judy Hogan’s first mystery novel, Killer Frost, which was a finalist in the St. Martin’s Malice Domestic Mystery contest, comes out Sept. 1 from Mainly Murder Press.  Judy founded Carolina Wren Press (1976-91), and was co-editor of Hyperion Poetry Journal, 1970-81).  She has published five volumes of poetry and two prose works with small presses. She has taught all forms of creative writing since 1974. She joined Sisters in Crime in 2007 and has focused on writing and publishing traditional mystery novels.  The twists and turns of her life’s path over the years have given her plenty to write about.  She is also a small farmer, loves her chickens, and grows about half her food.  She lives in Moncure, N.C. near the Haw River.

http://judyhogan.home.mindspring.com

http://postmenopausalzest.blogspot.com

***

Sasscer:

Like Judy, I had my crosses to bear as a child. Most of us did, one way or another. I am unable to point to any one person who “betrayed” me. But I can sure point to Lady Luck. Although I was born to a family that owned a little land, and a father with a law degree and a job at the Federal Trade Commission in DC, my father was a diagnosed manic depressive. Today, the fashionable term for the illness is Bipolar Disease. 

It was doubly unfortunate this occurred more than fifty years ago as lithium and other drugs used today were unknown. I do not blame my father. Not his fault. It was the miserable disease and the luck of the draw. His illness fueled three heart attacks, alcoholism, as well as stays at the loony bin, Sheppard Pratt, and the dreadful shock treatments he received there. My sister and I were shadowed by Mother’s constant fear that Daddy would lose his job and we would be penniless.

The family tobacco farm saved me as a child. Lady Luck had at least provided a retreat from my father’s wild freight train that roared through my childhood with changing carloads of mania and depression. You could see the train coming, but you never knew what was on it.

My father’s four maiden aunts lived at Pleasant Hills farm. They were all sane, kind, and clucked over me like hens. I loved the old home, the farm animals, and the land. I never wanted to be anywhere else and would beg to visit. As far as the “Aunts” were concerned, I could do no wrong. The ladies raised chickens, turkeys, an apple orchard and tended bountiful vegetable gardens. Sharecroppers raised the tobacco as well as corn, cows, Belgium draft horses and pigs. The Aunts, born before nineteen hundred, liked to save the drippings from bacon for lard. I still miss their flaky biscuits and homemade apple pies. I was lucky to know them.

If you glance at the photo of me with the rooster and you think I look a bit standoffish and tough, it’s because I was. I learned early to put up the mental shields and protect myself. My husband tells me the caption for the rooster picture should be “Get your own chicken.”

The best thing I inherited from my father was his sense of humor. Nothing keeps the abyss away like humor. It almost saved my father, too.

We lived in an apartment complex called Park Fairfax in Alexandria, Virginia. Daddy was a survivor, kept his job, and when I was about ten, we moved across the street into a bigger, better apartment next door to the complex director, Mr. Parker. Being the manager, Parker had a high opinion of himself. He loved flowering plants and stuffed the area in front of both his and my family’s apartment with blooming, potted plants. He never asked how we felt about this, and every so often more plants appeared.

My father purchased white price tags with strings, wrote a dollar amount on each tag, and tied one onto every plant. He was so amused by this, he could hardly stand himself. I might have giggled a little, too. The next morning all the plants were gone from our side, and Mr. Parker never spoke to my father again.

When I married, my husband and I moved into Pleasant Hills and we kept chickens for almost twenty years. I brought the first chicken home, plopped him onto the wooden porch in front of my previously urban husband and announced, “This is a chicken.” I had already named the bird “Hooster the Rooster.” Hooster marched to the edge of the porch and leaned over to inspect a cricket. He leaned over so far, he fell off. But as he ran away from us across the yard, his beak had a firm grip on that cricket. 

Not surprisingly, I favor British humor like “Fawlty Towers” and the “Monty Python” series. I love the ridiculous and am invariably drawn to those who share this love, like Judy Hogan. She totally “gets” that I love chickens because they are so silly. Besides, neither of us ever met a chicken who betrayed us.

Bio:

Sasscer Hill is an award nominated author of mystery novels and short stories, including Full Mortality, which was short listed for both Agatha and Macavity Best First Mystery Novel Awards. Her books feature the young protagonist, jockey Nikki Latrelle.

Her second novel in the series, Racing from Death, was published in April of 2012. To date, the mystery has received excellent reviews from the Baltimore Sun, Mystery Scene Magazine, The Horse of the Delaware Valley and award winning/best selling author, Margaret Maron.

Sasscer lives on a Maryland farm and has bred racehorses for many years. A winner of amateur steeplechase events, she has galloped her horses on the farm and trained them into the winner's circle.

Sasscer graduated with honors in English Literature from Franklin and Marshall College.

Book titles: Full Mortality, Best First Agatha and Macavity Nominee; Steam Roller, a Nikki Latrelle Short Story, 2011; Racing From Death, 2012.

Link to Sasscer Hill’s website where the first chapters of each of her books can be read.

http://sasscerhill.com/

Link to Amazon page for “Racing from Death.” http://tinyurl.com/7elojmj

My Black Baby Doll: The Sources of Killer Frost by Judy Hogan

Judy Hogan’s first mystery novel, Killer Frost, will be published by Mainly Murder Press in CT on September 1, 2012 in both trade paperback and e-book formats.  Judy founded Carolina Wren Press (1976-91) and was co-editor of Hyperion Poetry Journal, 1970-81).  She has published five volumes of poetry and two prose works with small presses. She has taught all forms of creative writing since 1974. She joined Sisters in Crime in 2007 and has focused on writing and publishing eight traditional mystery novels.  In 2011 she was a finalist in the St. Martin’s Malice Domestic Mystery contest for Killer Frost.  The twists and turns of her life’s path over the years have given her plenty to write about.  She is also a small farmer and lives in Moncure, N.C., near Jordan Lake.

My Black Baby Doll: The Sources of Killer Frost

by Judy Hogan

I can scarcely remember when I became aware that black people were different.  It was probably while I was three to six years old, during visits to my grandparents who lived in Pittsburgh and employed a maid and cook named Rose.  Rose was and wasn’t part of the family.  She was always very kind to me, as if she were a kind of extension of my grandparents’ enjoyment of their first grandchild.  Yet, at the end of the day, she put on different, outside clothes and a hat, and then she went home.

            I was seven when I learned that black people were treated differently.  In 1944, my father was a Navy Chaplain in the Pacific, and my mother, little sister, and I lived in Norman, Oklahoma.  Mother was the YWCA Secretary at the University of Oklahoma, and we lived near the campus.  One day at lunchtime, she brought home two black women to use the bathroom.

      

            When she returned after the meeting was over, she explained to me that, because Norman was a “sundown” town, no black people were allowed on campus or in town after sundown, and there were no bathrooms on campus or in the town that they could use.  I was shocked and upset, so Mother told me I could write to the Mayor of Norman, and I did.

 

            As an adult, I learned that Mother had worked during the war years on a legal case under the “Separate but Equal” law to get Lois Sipuel admitted to the University because there were no law schools in Oklahoma for Negroes.  She was eventually admitted, but she had to sit behind a screen.

            Not long after that incident, I wrote to my father and said that, when he left the Navy, I wanted to live in a town where I could have Negro children as my friends.  This didn’t happen.  In 1946 we moved to Jacksonville, Florida.  My father was the minister of the downtown Congregational Church, and he belonged to the Urban League.  I remember secret discussions between my parents and other liberal ministers in our home about racial justice.

            Across the street our friend Cletus had a black maid and yardman.  I was eleven, when I was in the front yard with Cletus, and my little brother, from his playpen, threw his ball into the street.  Cletus’s yardman brought it back and handed it to me, and I gave it back to Billy.  Cletus protested: “He touched it.  You should have washed it first!”  I objected, angry that she would even suggest such a thing.

            Because Jacksonville had a large black population, I saw in the dime store black, as well as white, baby dolls.  I asked for a black doll for Christmas and got it.  That doll represented my wish to do something to make things better for black people.  But it wasn’t until college and the Campus Y at O.U., and my church youth group, that in 1955-59, I was able to make black friends.

            One year after the Supreme Court desegregation ruling, O.U. admitted its first black student under this ruling, a Freshman girl.  I was also a Freshman girl that year, and I met her.  But it was through my Presbyterian Church group that I was able to have real conversations with Negro students.  Our leaders arranged for exchange gatherings with the young people in Langston, where the black college was.  The Y also had regional and national meetings I attended. 

            I remember at one conference, our little discussion group decided that intermarriage was the answer.  Then we’d all have a nice tan.  We were so pleased with our simple solution.

            But a life-changing event occurred in the summer of 1957, between my sophomore and junior years, when I attended a national Y conference in Miami, Ohio, and stayed over the weekend for a board meeting.  I was representing the Southwest.  John Crawley was there from Virginia State, representing the Southeast.  1957, I would later learn, was very tense period as the South took in the implications of the 1954 school desegregation decision.  John and I fell in love.  We wrote letters for awhile, and then he stopped writing.

 

            A year or so later, he wrote me a long letter explaining that he’d had to give me up.  He said that it was too much to ask of me to marry him.  I had been willing to for many months, but when I didn’t hear from him, I dated other people, and when the letter came, I had another boyfriend.  Later still I would read Thulani Davis’s book, 1959, about the racial tensions in a small Virginia small town, and understand better why John wrote that letter.

            In 1998 I ran across my letters to my parents about John and found his full name and old address.  Then I found a current Petersburg address for him by internet and wrote to him.  His mother, Pearl Crawley, called me.  She told me John had died in 1996.  I told her we had loved each other, and she said, “I would have welcomed you as a daughter.”  She did, when we met soon after.

            We became close quickly, and I learned about John’s life.  He’d grown up in a sharecropper’s family, graduated from Virginia State with a B.A. and a Master’s, but he hadn’t become a minister or a professor, as I’d expected, given his intelligence and convictions.  Instead, he’d spent his life working first on the War on Poverty in New Jersey, and then later for homeless shelters and food banks in Southside Virginia.  Pearl Crawley died a year ago, in 2010, but I am so glad I was able to know and love her.

            When my husband and I moved to North Carolina in 1971, things were still tense racially, because the schools were beginning to be desegregated.  You were either for or against racial equality, and I was for.  I was co-editor, with Paul Foreman of Hyperion Poetry Journal, and fairly quickly black poets sent me work, and I met them: Jaki Shelton Green, her husband at the time, Sherman Shelton, Lance Jeffers, Julia Field, Jerry Barrax, and T.J. Reddy (one of the Charlotte Three–in prison in 1973-4 for a crime he and his friends didn’t commit: burning a stable).  I would later, as Carolina Wren Press Editor, publish poetry books by Jaki, T.J., and still later, C. Eric Lincoln.  Jaki went on to be given the North Carolina Award for Literature, the state’s highest literary award, in 2003.

            I also set up a Minority Book Prize in 1983, and Linda Brown won it with her first novel, Rainbow Roun’ Mah Shoulder.  The second time we offered the prize, Gloree Rogers won it for Love, or a Reasonable Facsimile (1990).

            Meantime, the writers had been educating me, as had living in integrated Interfaith Council housing in Chapel Hill with my children 1975-78, where I’d learned that I knew very little about the reality of black life in the South.  I think now that, because I was a white woman, it was easier for me to get away with publishing black writers, and by the early eighties, my doing that was useful to the Durham Arts Council and the North Carolina Arts Council, who were under the gun to show minority participation.

            When I taught the “Roadmap to Great Literature for New Writers” under a N.C. Humanities grant, in 1981, we held it in the Stanford Warren branch, formerly the black library in the Durham County system, and we had more black participants there.  So when I could reserve the auditorium in the Main library for our lectures during a later grant and realized I was losing black participants, I started having a second session at the Stanford Warren branch for black writers.  They could be more at ease and discuss issues around race, which they did.  Gloree Rogers was in that class.

            Curiously, to me, one of my Carolina Wren board members, Pauletta Bracey, who taught Library Science at North Carolina Central University, told me, after we got C. Eric Lincoln from Duke to come to the Stanford Warren Library to talk about Malcolm X (we were reading his autobiography), said, “Judy, you’re more accepted here in the black community than Eric Lincoln is.”

            When I was looking for land and a house for my old age in 1998, I used a realtor whose mother I’d come to love when I did some Roadmap programming in Rougemont for senior citizens.  I told Liz that I thought I’d be more comfortable and safer in the black community, and we found three acres and the shell of a house in Moncure, and I bought it, had the house finished and began part-time farming.  My neighbors are black, and the best neighbors I could have.  We help each other.

            So when I needed a job in 2004, and I was offered one at historically black St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, to teach Reading to Freshmen who hadn’t done well on the entrance exams, I took it gladly.  I taught there three years and came to love the students.  Killer Frost grew out of that experience, as all my novels are based on experiences I’ve had and then fictionalized.  When I write mysteries, I write about what matters to me, people I love, things I want to change and make better.  I realize I’m still carrying that black baby doll in my deep mind.

Why I Write Mysteries by Judy Hogan

Judy Hogan was born in Zenith, Kansas.  She has lived in the Triangle area of N.C. for 40 years.  She brought to the state a new poetry journal (Hyperion, 1970-81) and in 1976 she founded Carolina Wren Press.  She has been active in the area since the early 70s as a reviewer, book distributor, publisher, teacher, writing consultant, and organizer of conferences, readings, and book signing events.  She was Chair of COSMEP (Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers) 1975-78.  In 1984 she helped found and was the first President of the N.C. Writers' Network, serving until 1987.

She has published five volumes of poetry with small presses, and two prose works, Watering the Roots in a Democracy: A Manual for Combining Literature and Writing in the Public Library (1989) and The PMZ Poor Woman’s Cookbook (2000).

A translation of her poetry book, Beaver Soul, was published by the Kostroma Writers’ Organization in 1997.       

Her papers, correspondence, and 25 years of extensive diaries are in the Special Collections Department of the Perkins Library at Duke University.

She has taught all forms of creative writing since 1974, through libraries, in extension programs, and on her own.

She taught Freshman English 2004-2006 at St. Augustine’s College, an historically black college in Raleigh.  She does free lance editing and offers workshops for creative writers.

Between 1990 and 2007 she visited Kostroma, Russia, five times, teaching American literature at Kostroma University in 1995 and giving a paper to a Kostroma University Literature Conference in March 2007.  She worked on five exchange visits, as well as cooperative publishing with Kostroma writers and exhibits of their painters.  She has been active in environmental and community issues in Chatham County.

She’s also a member of Sisters In Crime (Guppies, GuppyPressQuest list).

Judy lives in Moncure, N.C., near Jordan Lake, in Chatham County.

                          

Why I Write Mysteries

by Judy Hogan

I began reading mysteries in 1980, when my elder daughter left for college. Once the two younger children were in bed, and I'd finished my work for the day (I was editor and publisher of Carolina Wren Press, as well as teaching some writing classes for adults), there was an hour or so when I wasn't sleepy yet. I began with Agatha Christie. Amy and I had watched Mash together. Now I read mysteries.

My father, a United Church of Christ minister, had read mysteries to relax, so I asked him for suggestions and began with British women: Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, P.D. James. Friends suggested Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Amanda Cross, Martha Grimes, Arthur Upfield, and over the years I've been delighted to read all the books of: Louise Penny, Julia Spencer-Fleming, Elizabeth George, Laurie King, Peter Robinson, Stephen Booth, Lindsay Davis, Charles Todd, Eliot Pattison, Michael Innes, Margaret Maron, Marjorie Allingham, Jacqueline Winspeare, Barbara Hambley, Alexander McCall Smith, Tony Hillerman, Margaret Coel, Elizabeth Peters, Ellis Peters, Reginald Hill, and new favorite, Sasscer Hill.

I liked a plot, but what gave the most pleasure were the subplots, the exploration of human relationships, and the different worlds I could enter. Mysteries became a way to relax and let go my worries and responsibilities for awhile, yet have new things to think about. I especially liked strong women protagonists, but I loved best the books that gave me what I call the cozy feeling. I liked it when the protagonist and friend would have comfort food, give each other emotional support. The crime had to be solved, but there was time for food, drink, humor, and love.

These days a cozy has come to mean a craft mystery novel, but when I think of a cozy mystery, it's more in the Malice Domestic Traditional Mystery mode (as in their contest sponsored by St. Martin's Press for the first best of these novels): no explicit sex or violence. The victim and the murderer are known within a limited world; there are suspects, and the reader is given enough clues to be able to guess whodunit.

In 1981 I began going abroad when I could afford it, as my ex-husband took the children more in the summer. I called these trips writing vacations, and my favorite place to go in the 80s was to the Gower Peninsula in Wales, where I could explore a variety of landscapes and historical sites down through the ages, from Ice Age caves to prehistoric stone monuments like Arthur's Stone, Norman castles, limestone cliffs, bays with their exotic wild flowers and tide pools teeming with sea life. I'd write poetry, but in the evening, I'd read what my landlady called "murders." She couldn't get me to watch the telly. I'd be too caught up in a "murder" provided by the little local library.

Then in 1990, on one of my long walks between Rhossili and Llangennith, I sprained my ankle. No more long walks that year. I wrote poetry and read, but I was housebound for several weeks. My landlady said, "Why don't you write a murder?" I'd never thought I could do it. They seemed at the opposite end of the literary spectrum from poetry, but, for fun, I began to plot my first mystery, set on Gower in a Bed and Breakfast, and the next summer I wrote The Sands of Gower.

I've begun my eighth mystery this month, going back again in imagination to Gower. In between, over the last twenty years, I've had my amateur detective, Penny Weaver, a mid-fifties poet, who likes to cross the ethnic and cultural boundaries that usually keep people apart, working on environmental and other local issues as part of an interracial community group. She is married to a Welsh Police Detective. Killer Frost, the sixth novel, when Penny teaches in an historically black college, was a finalist in the St. Martin's Malice Domestic First Best Traditional Mystery contest this year. It gave me my first major lift up. By 2007, when I became semi-retired, I joined Sisters in Crime and the Guppies (the great unpublished) and worked on finding an agent for the early books in the series. But, even with being a finalist, no agent grabbed up Killer Frost. I'm now querying small presses, using information provided by the SinC GuppyPressQuest listserve. Generally, I have had more interest from the small presses doing mysteries than from the agents.  I think the early ones are worth publishing, but for me now, I want to get Killer Frost out there first, and then I'll see how to handle the earlier ones.

Why do I write mysteries now? There are human experiences I've had and things I know that I can't get into poetry or my journal and autobiographical books but only into fiction. It also gives me an opportunity to take up social and cultural issues I care about. I have been an activist like Penny, working on safe nuclear storage, air pollution, local elections, etc., but I feel now that what I have to give the wider world that is potentially the most helpful are my writings - all of them - and the way I see people and the world we live in.

Our two biggest issues, I believe, in the twenty-first century, are learning to take care of our earth so we can continue to live on it and learning to understand and appreciate people different from ourselves, instead of warring, persecuting, and generally reducing to less than human those with whom we share Planet Earth. Like my favorite mysteries do, I want to give the reader cozy moments, time to eat, laugh, and love, between the difficult issues we all have to cope with, and I take the opportunity to explore what I know and didn't know I knew about people, as my characters interact.

Thank you, Kaye, for inviting me to blog here on a blog I deeply respect, Meandering and Muses.

Judy Hogan, Moncure, N.C.

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web page: http://judyhogan.home.mindspring.com
blog: http://postmenopausalzest.blogspot.com