Although born in Steubenville Ohio, where I spent the first 12 years of my life, I consider myself as having been raised in West Virginia. I can still remember those seemingly endless trips–back before the interstate made traveling so much more efficient. We saw countryside–at a time when Mail Pouch Tobacco was still advertized on huge unpainted plank barns--and drove through small sleepy towns where I gazed out the dusty windows of our rattletrap cars as we passed through empty streets that resembled ghost towns. Only now am I realizing the piece of Americana that I was actually living.

The difference between my two worlds was the proverbial big city versus backwoods country. My brothers caught crawdads and ran the hillsides, while I usually made myself sick eating purplish red plums and green apples from the fruit trees that set between my grandparents house and their numerous outbuildings. I can still feel the awe at walking out the backdoor and picking an apple from a tree instead of the fruit and vegetable section at our grocery store.

I was agog with the three huge meals in contrast to the quick breakfast before school, a sandwich and snack for lunch and the simple city supper in the evening. Even now, when simple suppers are the rule rather than the exception, I feel guilty when I throw a frozen pizza in the oven or heat a can of soup.

My writing didn’t evolve until I was 40. It was a reverse legacy. My daughter, Lisa, has kept a personal journal since she was 9, filling it with her thoughts and her poetry, and my son, Wade, has written short stories ever since the epical whimsy of the “Magic” cards and “Dungeons and Dragons” began some 15 years ago.

My granddaughter, Cheyenne, has just gotten the reading bug–she loves Goosebumps. She has more imagination than all of us put together. I’m thankful it doesn’t extend to monsters in the closet or under her bed.

At the time I first put pen to paper, I was living so far out in the country that when the snow fell you didn’t get out for a week or better. My books were in storage and the library was 16 miles away. So, along to the accompaniment of chirping crickets and frogs in the summer and the howling wind and snow in the winter, I began the most exhilarating journey of my life.

Writers are, at all times, caught in a enigma. We have an inescapable obsession to write what comes to us in the dark of night or the radiant light of a new day, but, like some kind of catch 22, we, also, have an unrelenting compulsion to give our readers what they want.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Robin is an amateur photographer, who enjoys reading, movies and all music. She is an advocate for the rights of animals and Mother Earth. Robin has a daughter, Lisa, and a granddaughter, Cheyenne Skye; a son, Wade, with a grandson, Christopher Robin, born in March 2005.