This diverse collection of poems spans some seventy years. I have always written poetry, scribbling on whatever paper was on hand. Some of these early tomes have been lost; some of them should have been lost. For better or worse I have gathered old and new in this my last book Here in these poems, my life is exposed-- my memories and my words, my thoughts of joy and sadness, regrets and victories are all mixed up in time and places. Most memories have traveled with me through a happy childhood, a happy marriage, a happy motherhood. These reflections of quiet yesterdays, of hours just being still, of soaking up Paris for six Julys, of letting time run through me, of looking for moonlight on the Gulf looking for me. Such things have been my life, but for you, I hope you find treasures of laughter and love on every page.

THE RELUCTANT HUNTER won the Texas Writers Recognition Award for poetry, a grant of $2000 toward publication of this book, sponsored by the Texas Commission On Arts and presented by the Texas Institute Of Letters. The first edition was published by Latitudes Press in 1989. THE RELUCTANT HUNTER is a collection of sixty poems, covering a span of twenty years. The setting is West Texas at its best and at its worst. There is a subtext of the hunter moving from an over-persuaded spouse to a devotee of the sport. In the beginning, she sat in a deer blind with a shotgun on her left and a rifle on her right, doing what she loved to do best in the world, dreaming with a pen in her hand and a notebook in her lap writing poetry. She was a city girl who loved concrete and indoor plumbing, but sometime during those twenty seasons she fell in love with the spreading oaks, the kalechi roads, the scrubby mesquite-covered hills, the rustic old cabin, and last but far from least, the simple pleasures of hunting with her husband on their deer lease in Brackettville.

How would you like to sit on the floor with your grandmother and listen to her tell stories again? Old stories that she made up just for you? These are not great novels like Harry Potter or The Hobbit, these are small stories and poems, full of small memories and small adventures that were told with laughter and love. Many's Stories are just that, a grandmother's gift to her children, her grandchildren, and her great-children in hopes that they will never forget those special hours she shared with them so long ago.