So, here I am. I guess I could tell you junk like the jobs I've held or where I went to school. Pretty dull stuff. Maybe we'll just save that for job applications.

I've been a lot of places. I'm pretty lucky that way. I grew up in a small town in Washington State, where the streets were named after pioneer families, and each fall, hundred-year-old apple trees grew heavy with the most succulent apples I have ever tasted. In the fields where I played, blackberry vines sprawled in tangled mounds and spiders spun dew-spangled webs. When storms blew in from Puget Sound to toss the Douglas Firs' high crowns, I imagined ancient earth-spirits moving in the forest just beyond mortal sight.

But I wanted escape to escape the rain and the dullness of small town life, so at age 18, I headed to the Great Basin. From chaotic green to earth so sear and silent that I could hear my own heart beat ... the change shocked me profoundly. Until, that is, I learned a greater truth: in the desert, one's heart is what one is meant to hear.

For the next umpteen years, I mostly rode for cattle ranches and packed mules for guide- outfitter services. It was a transient life but a good one. Long miles to the swing of a horse's stride taught me patience. Hard work drummed perseverence into my bones. Sunsets that flamed in towers of cloud taught me awe and wonder. And a sky that arched from horizon to horizon, bearing the scents of sage and pine and the echoes of ancient lives ... that sky taught me freedom.

Nowadays I live a quiet life, just hubby, the dogs, the cats, and me, along with a few chickens and a garden. The sagebrush hills remain just beyond our door. I have survived cancer - one never hears the words "you're cured" - and I've learned much about things worth treasuring. My husband is my best friend, my friends are few but cherished, I show my border collies in sheepdog trials, and I get horseback when I can. And I write. Always and forever, I have written. In the end, I have found, that is who I truly am.

In closing, it is my hope that the stories I tell will one day transport others to places and times where they thought they might never go. If I can do that ... I will count myself content.

Blessings and peace to you all. Written at home this 22nd day of June, 2009.

~ G. M. Atwater
Mountain House

Rudyard Kipling, Andre Norton, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Louis Stevenson, Katherine Kurtz, Robert Service, Alan Dean Foster, Mark Twain, James Herriot, Piers Anthony, Stephen Crane, Thornton W. Burgess, Zane Grey, David Eddings, Armstrong Sperry, Jack Schaffer, Lloyd Alexander, Jim A. Kjelgaard, Ursula Leguin, Marguerite Henry, Morgan Llewellyn, S. E. Hinton, Fritz Leiber, Jack London, Merritt Parmelee Allen, George MacDonald, John Steinbeck, Wendy and Richard Pini, Louis L'Amour, A. B. Guthrie, Herman Melville, Patricia A. McKillip, Walter Farley, Albert Payson Terhune, C. J. Cherryh, Edward Abbey, Bruce Catton, Dan Parkinson, Parke Godwin, Will James, Barry Holstun Lopez, Alexander Dumas, Nancy Springer, Daniel Woodrell, Jane Candia Coleman, Parke Godwin, Dan Parkinson ...