Winner of the 2023 Fugere Book Prize
By the age of 6, I was the most famous storywriter/teller among my tribe of stuffed animals, dolls, and enthusiastic young muses—a truly captive audience. At age 60, my first book was published—Three Guesses, an epistolary novella that won Regal House Publishing’s 2023 Fugere Book Prize recognizing finely crafted novellas.
The thrill of having this story out in the world still catches my breath. That this giant leap took over thirty years to manifest boggles but inspires me. The number of times across those years it appeared and disappeared, much like its characters, cannot be calculated but shows how determined it was to break free and fly (Latin: fugere).
Multitudes of stories crowd my computer and notebooks, wanting and waiting to be told, literary and contemporary in nature, a bit speculative at times. My characters are usually trying to find their places in this crazy world or doing their very best to manage the world they’re in—soul searchers, daydreamers, lovers, family, friends, and strangers whose chance meeting reweaves their life tapestries.
The characters in Three Guesses cover most of these—a quirky bunch that evolved from eras of my quirky life, though I am not them and they are not me.
Sam Brooks showed up first, a bored young woman working as an office temp who has no idea who or what or where she’s supposed to be in life. I was a temp in my early life and rarely had time to be bored, but I was definitely trying to find my place.
Then I found myself working with a small, local newspaper. We needed to fill some space in the Classifieds, so a coworker and I started what might have been the first “I saw you…” banter across several issues, and this comrade’s role, not his personality, became Richard Mabry, an older gay man who comes off a bit highbrow but genuine, with a lifelong career as a researcher of things and a searcher of love.
Pete Wren, the eclectic New York artist who arrives with ego, mental issues, and creativity in words as much as paint, balances out the serendipitous friendship that was brewing by mail in my mind.
I love this unlikely trio, fully discovered in 1990 on my first trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina (which becomes its own character in the story). I’m amazed by how different they are yet so similar in their dreams and thoughts, their pasts, their wins and losses. And I marvel at what they choose to share and how they tell their stories—muses extraordinaire. I’ve read their letters so many times I can’t count—on purpose for publishing phases and for my own entertainment—and every time I laugh and weep at the same places, in love with Sam, Richard, Pete, and the others who become part of their found family.
I knew their story wasn’t finished, but Three Guesses ended itself where it wanted to, and I really had no choice in the matter except to carry their lives forward several years later in the sequel, Second Guesses, when the world is shuttered and the old-fashioned art of letter writing brings nostalgia and comfort to this crew across thousands of miles of separation, with life reveals that might never have surfaced face-to-face.
Writing for me is not hard and lonely; it’s fun and enlightening. I do get stuck sometimes and set it aside, and often I can’t give it the time it needs, but when I race back to it I’m like a six-year-old again, but now with real fur babies at my side and muses swirling who either stick with me or dart off to another writer waiting for a spark.
I’m a country girl at heart with a huge imagination that started with growing up in rural Western Kentucky (Graves County and Mayfield) and spending loads of time outside and on our family farms. From there, I graduated from Murray State University, just a few miles down the road, then moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where I’ve lived for over 40 years.
I’m thrilled to share that along with receiving the 2023 Fugere Book Prize, Three Guesses also won the 2026 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Novella and an Honorable Mention for the 2026 Eric Hoffer Book Awards for General Fiction (along with making the Grand Prize Shortlist and being named a Finalist for the First Horizon Award for superior work by a debut author).
Second Guesses, the sequel to Three Guesses and my second published novella, will be available in fall 2028.
