My family moved a lot, often driving cross country for long stretches at a time, sleeping in the car when we had too little money to stay in even the cheapest of motels. It was on those voyages that I first began to compose stories. Seeing houses in the middle of nowhere and wondering who lived in them, I invented lives.
Junkyard Dreams resulted from a personal endeavor to prevent the development of a ridgetop near my home. Although completely fictional, the novel represents my attempt to understand why our very desire for beauty can lead us to damage our environment. Joe is not an evil man. He truly wants what we all want: love and a nice place to live. Rita, on the other hand, is no saint. She has selfish reasons for trying to preserve the land. It is in looking out solely for themselves that they forget we share this planet and need to learn to get along.
I hope those of you who read Junkyard Dreams will enjoy travelling there with me.
The novel received the 2010 Zia Award for an outstanding work of fiction published in 2007-2009 by a woman living in or affiliated with New Mexico.