Finding Your Passion

The Laughing Ladies found me, rather than the other way around.  It started when

Pat Porter, a good friend and fantastic watercolor artist and teacher, said in her marvelous offhand manner, that if she couldn’t paint some time during the day, she might as well not get up in the morning.  I thought enviously, “How wonderful to have a passion like that.”  I  remembered her words when I started writing The Laughing Ladies, eager to get to the computer every day.  I was experiencing the feeling Pat described.

As the story took shape, I wondered where it had been hiding all these years.  I never imagined myself a writer and here I was, living in a mining town, high in the Colorado Rockies.  I  created a world to inhabit for a few hours a day, with no idea why I chose to be there.  Perhaps, I was being channeled by an 1893 prostitute who wanted her story told.   

From NYC to the American West

Why does a native New Yorker, living in a Manhattan apartment high above the city, find herself boarding a westbound train to the Colorado Rockies in 1893? This is not about time travel, but about how one woman found her way, in fiction, to the Old West.

It started with a visit to The Laughing Ladies, a charming restaurant in Salida, CO. When asked how the restaurant got its name, the proprietor explained that I was dining in a former bordello. Definitely not an answer I would hear in New York City. The evolution of the space  intrigued me. How does a brothel wind up a restaurant? I decided to create the answer.  The story of The Laughing Ladies began.