"Enough of the professional credentials. Here is a list of some of my favorite things:

THE BOYS. Ian and Miles, my nearly grown sons. One is Mr. Clean, a law student with a sharp, funny sense of humor. The other is Mr. Eccentric, a tall and study lad with a charming smile and an absolute sense that he’s going to be “discovered” any minute. The weird thing is - their handwriting is almost exactly the same. It freaks both of them out.:)

THE CITY. My father used to say nobody leaves Colorado for good—the mountains always call you home. In my case, it was a particular mountain that called me back: Pikes Peak. I’ve moved back to my home town, Colorado Springs, and am deliriously happy to be here. My office window overlooks the Front Range, burly and blue, dominated by the elephant skin shoulders of the Peak.

It’s an odd city in ways, weirdly conservative, but also subversively radical. It’s a city where soldiers and granola heads, hikers and evangelicals, nuns and militants co-exist in mostly peaceful ways. It’s also one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever seen, and as an outdoor girl, I gotta say it’s good to have a zillion hiking trails to traverse at any moment.

THE GUY. The reason, actually, that I moved back to the Springs. Christopher Robin, thus nick-named for his way of calmly knowing the answer to almost everything, and because he once said we should take “elevenses” to the top of the mountain. Eccentric, adorable, and brilliantly clever.
Oh, and did I mention the great runner’s legs?

THE TRAVEL. Maybe because I have such long roots in my native state, I have incurable wanderlust. I’m pretty sure I was infected, very young, by my grandmother, who would toss me in the car and take off in her giant Lincoln, and drive to Texas or Washington. We stayed in theme motels and made friends with truck drivers and on one memorable trip, were stranded in the wilds of Wyoming in a blizzard. It all delighted me.

Nothing makes me happier than setting out, early in the morning, for an airport or a road trip. It almost doesn’t even matter where—I love driving a few hours down the road to Taos, or taking a quick flight to Las Vegas as much as I love flying to Paris or London. The thrill of going, seeing new things, new places, new faces is what excites me. I love planning and executing big trips, but I also need the small ones, the weekend jaunts, to stay refreshed and rejuvenated. All my extra pennies go toward travel and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

THE BOOKS. Sometimes people will ask me, “Do you like being a writer?” I always say the same thing: how could anyone ask for a better job? I get to stay at home, in my yoga pants and Jimi Hendrix t-shirt and play all day at something I’d do anyway. And they pay me for it! Wow!

Truth is, I feel very lucky. I was in the fifth grade when I figured out that some people spent their lives writing novels and in that moment, I seriously wondered why anybody would do anything else. I imagined sitting in a rose-covered cottage, scribbling away quietly where no one would bother me, making things up all day long. The reality is somewhat different, both more challenging and more rewarding than I could have imagined in those days, but I never regret the choice to fling all that I am into this career.

What I didn’t realize in those days was that the writing life is great, but the books are what make it worthwhile. Getting the vision, catching that excitement, then working through the stages to completion, falling in love, over and over and over, with a character who has a story to tell—that’s the great part of writing. It’s endlessly challenging, and no matter how hard a writer works, she’ll never learn everything, so it’s always exciting and fresh. The books. I love the books.

THE WEST. It is a world painted in strong colors and shapes—the fierce blue of the giant sky, the burly shoulders of the Front Range along the western horizon, a brilliant swath of high desert, covered in magenta as the walking stick cactuses bloom. Life is different here. Beer is a lot more likely to be served than wine. We all boast recipes for green chile. A pow wow is a real event, where the colors swell and shine like you’ve never seen. Big trucks are ordinary, but they have water tanks or horse hitches on the back, not bed liners. The SUV better really get up a mountain. You probably have a dog, and his name is probably not Sweetie Pie.

In the west, the land matters. It’s vast and sometimes challenging and every inch of it is precious. In other places, you can slip away from the knowledge of the earth at times, slip away into a forest, which is all above the ground, or off to the beach, where the water, not land, is the focus. In the west, the land is omnipresent, dramatic. It reminds you of its power—and it’s eternalness—every minute of every day. The mountains and the light and the sky, changing and remaining, remind you that our lives are small and precious. A hawk, circling overhead for his supper, makes you remember there were many who went before and many who will come after. It is, in some ways, a harsh world, one with little water and dramatic weather that can kill you with surprise. Not so dramatically, it is a landscape littered with plants that bite—not only the multitudinous varieties of cactus (you haven’t lived until you’ve plucked ten thousand nearly invisible cactus spines from your palm), but weeds with fishhook leaves and the swords of yuccas sticking out of the earth, and my own personal favorite: goatheads, so called because they are the bone-shape of a dead goat, and at each point, they have a poison thorn.

It’s also a place of many cultures, and I’m in love with all of them. The sound of Spanish radio coming through a kitchen window or a Fiesta Day parade; the cowboys in their worn boots and grandly polite gestures; the strong faces of white women weathered by six decades of that strong, high-altitude sun; the sight of a Native American mural painted by a Cheyenne boy at the school. Soldiers and nuns, radicals and evangelicals and party girls. It’s exhilarating, the mix. Sometimes it’s uneasy. Sometimes hostile. At it’s best, it’s a celebration of the multicultural world that is America.

THE COMMUNITY. Readers. Booksellers. Librarians. Reviewers. Writers. What a smart, interesting, thoughtful group of people! Ever notice that the conversation never flags or gets boring when you have a collection of book people together? Ever notice how many wise things you hear in such a gathering? I feel very blessed to be part of such a community, and if I’m ever tempted to be depressed about the future of the world, all I have to do is sign on to a reader board or listen to a librarian or visit my local bookstore and talk to the clerks and I feel more certain that all will work out well.
YOU. Thanks for coming by. I hope you've enjoyed yourself."
- Barbara