Some of my most vivid and joyful memories from my youth are rooted in the variety of places in which my family lived and the characters we met while there.
I was born in Texas and spent most of my years growing up moving from place to place – Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, back to Texas, to central Alabama, back to Texas, then to north Alabama. It was there, in northern Alabama, that my parents found something to tie us down. What that was, I can’t say for sure, but decades later I wonder if my father found something there that felt familiar. A touch of the south that he had known in Arkansas as a boy, perhaps? A way to return to his roots?
I’ll never know the answer for sure, but now that my parents have passed out of this life, I have discovered that something from that place has stayed with me. It’s that something – an aggregate of quirky personality traits, store fronts, and country roads – which forms the pillars that my current fiction is built upon. Morgan Crossroads, Alabama is a purely fictitious community set in an area that is real, but not exactly. It is a place where Walmart has not yet landed. A traffic jam occurs when more than five vehicles are at the light at the same time. One can still see a sky full of stars at night, unhindered by the radiating light from any larger city or town down the road. Everybody knows everybody else, or at least they think so.
I no longer live in Alabama, but many of my memories still do, as do my siblings. As I complete each book in the Morgan Crossroads series, I hope you’ll take a break from the hustle and bustle of city life and see what Marcella, Eva Jo, Dora Mae, Henry Brown and the rest are up to. An occasional chuckle will do you good.
