I have always been a storyteller. My first stories were for an audience of one — myself. I was the oldest child by nearly five years, growing up on a small family farm seven miles from the nearest town in southern Illinois. We couldn’t afford a TV until I was in fourth grade. I remember how disappointed I was one year when our grandparents gifted both my dad and his sister with sums of money. My aunt and her husband purchased a TV. My parents used the money to buy much needed baby chicks to raise. We needed the income.
I learned to read very young, encouraged by both my parents, but especially my dad. He gave me A Child’s History and Geography of the World when I was about five. I told him, “I can’t read these.” He answered, “You will, and until then we will read them to you.” And that’s exactly what happened. I learned about ancient Greeks and Romans, the French Revolution, and countries and natural wonders around the world.
I made up stories as I watched my dad and my grandfather working in the fields, where we raised corn and soybeans, and tended cattle, pigs, and chickens. I gave the animals names and included them in the stories. Having a sister, followed by two brothers, meant that I could include them in my stories, whether they wanted to be or not.
When I started school my experiences with words broadened, and I had a poem published in our regional Catholic newspaper when I was in second grade. (No, it will not appear in public again.)
The stories continued, either in my head or on paper, although I never took myself seriously as a writer. I had no idea that was something a farm girl could even think of doing. I set it aside, but the stories continued in my head.
It wasn’t until many years later, when I was living and teaching in Costa Rica, that I began to write again. Funny how a change of scene can spur your brain to do things you didn’t know you could do. I was involved in a couple of writing groups there at the international school where I taught. And it was there that I first received pay for articles I wrote. I had tears in my eyes when I picked up the payment in cash, Costa Rican “colones” amounting to about $25, from the office of The Tico Times, the English language newspaper in Costa Rica.
After my time in Costa Rica, I had been bitten by the travel bug. On a trip to the UK, I stayed for several nights in a bed and breakfast called the Gate House in Spaulding, Lincolnshire. The Gate House, a mystery set in a similar town named “Springfield,” became my first novel.
As I wrote The Gate House, I realized how vital setting is to a story. I often think of the setting as another character. If I had not climbed up inside the vaulting of Lincoln Cathedral on their roof tour, I would not have been able to place my characters in that precarious spot. In a later novel, the same characters explore sites in the Pyrenees Mountains in Spain where battles in the Spanish Civil War had been fought. It would be impossible to pick up the plots of either of these stories and set them down in another location without drastically changing the story.
And the stories continue. My characters wander the world with me, and they connect with the past. In Lydia’s Story, my main character Nara discovers diaries from her great-grandmother who was a British spy during World War II. In the novel I am currently working on, she learns that an ancestor was a suffragist in the 1920s, when single women were referred to as “superfluous.”
A student once said to me, “I don’t like to read. I would rather experience things myself.” I told her, “We can’t experience everything, but through reading we can broaden our experience through imagination.”
Article Submission Date: 11-05-2024
Author’s Page At Book Marketing Global Network:
https://bookmarketingglobalnetwork.com/book-marketing-global-network/author-kathleen-heady/
