I was born in Martinsville, Virginia on December 19, 1955 to Juanita Burch Arnoult, a Baptist beautician originally from Draper, North Carolina, and Joseph Henry Arnoult, a Catholic architect originally from Memphis, Tennessee. My mother wanted to be a movie star, my father wanted to be a fighter pilot. I wanted to be a cowgirl almost from the day I was born, but in forty-two years the opportunity never presented itself. And then it did.

My father did accept payment once in the form of a Shetland pony named Buckshot, the orneriest pony who ever lived. No one could stay on his back.

So for a time, I stopped thinking of riding and roping, and concentrated on watching cowboys in thirty-minute episodes on TV until detectives took over television.

When I was a little girl, we lived in several houses, but the one I remember most was at the corner of Broad Street and Chestnut, a big white two-story house with a large front porch. It was two blocks from downtown Martinsville, within spitting distance of the Broad Street Hotel and the Yellow Cab stand. As you came in the door to a wide hallway with a staircase, my mother's beauty shop was to the left and my father's office was to the right. We lived in the back of the first floor, and my mother took in roomers on the second floor. She said she always rented to men because women were too much trouble.

I loved growing up so close to town. My parents knew everyone. I walked downtown with my father for lunch at the Henry Confectionary. Desert was always either a piece of chocolate pie or half a stewed pear on a bed of lettuce and a dollop of mayo on top. From my childs perspective, it was an idyllic life. But it wasn't quite that way from a grown-up point of view.

We moved to Danville when I was in second grade. Things were never the same, but they were always interesting. And that can be a good thing for a writer. Now one wants to read about just happy things. It's all material to go into the compost heap, as Robert Olen Butler says.  I have a big compost heap! Things rise up in pieces and are transformed by imagination. I love that I can recycle fragments from the best memories along with those more fertile shadowy pieces.

I lived nineteen years of my life in the foothills of Virginia-Martinsville, Danville, Fieldale, and Bassett. I spent the next twenty-five years in North Carolina, mostly in Chapel Hill and Durham, with a short stint at Camp Lejeune and a year in Irmo, South Carolina.

Then, on April Fool's Day 2000 I married the cowboy of my dreams and moved to middle Tennessee, where my husband, William Brock, encouraged me to ride horses and to write full time. I know have two books to my credit, and I have been known to stay in the saddle for 12 hours a day on trail rides. That isn't exactly cowgirling, but it ought to count for something.

William Brock's birds

Right after he got the Mig welder, William welded old rusty pieces of farm equipment found in hidden ditches onour farm into objects to accent my flower garden: a sundail made from a rearend housing from a Model A,

a wheel from a corn planter, and a plow point for instance. But my husband, an engineer by training,

soon became board with that kind of artwork and said he was going to go make a bird.  A couple of days later, he took me to his shop, and there was a bird, each feather cut by hand from old roofing tin. Now, several years later, he is alsomaking birds from copper flashing.  His work is represented by three galleries.  discovered at midlife that he is an artist.  He began making birds out of recycled roofing tin and copper flashing. Now his birds are in two galleries in North Carolina and one in Tennessee. It is amazing what you can discover about yourself at midlife.

Currently, I'm working on one novel with a character

worried about detectives taking over television, and

there is a second novel I return to between other projects because it takes so much research. In that novel, set in Paris, TN during WWII, there's a rooming house with a beauty salon downstairs. All the roomers are women.

For more information about William Brock and his work, go to www.rustedbirdstudio.com.