Authors Enthrall CPW Members

Three Colorado authors with very different backgrounds and books nevertheless enthralled CPW members and their book club friends' annual authors' meeting.

Jackie St. John, a lawyer and former judge, discussed her novel, My Sisters Made of Light, based on the stories of a Pakistani woman teacher. To protect the woman, she changed her name and changed many of the details to create a fictional account. She covers honor killing in Pakistan, since the honor of a family there resides in the chastity of women. Women who are raped there are charged with fornication if single or adultery if married and jailed. She said the process of writing her first novel was a lot like creating a painting. She just kept working on it, after reading books on writing and then rewriting her work several times. She intends to raise $15,000 to help her Pakistani friend create a women's shelter for women and children escaping abuse. She has already raised $9,000.

Hannah Nordhaus began her first book journey with interviews for a magazine article on Honey Stingers for Delicious Living magazine. One beekeeper she interviewed was so compelling that she continued to interview him for an article for High Country News. The article has gotten more hits on its website than any other article in their history. A publisher contacted her about developing it into a book. In her book, The Beekeeper's Lament, she discussed problems of beekeepers, particularly the challenges of the barilla mite and Colony Collapse Disorder as well as cheap honey imports from China and Argentina. The focus is a beekeeper who hauls 14,000 hives to almond, cherry and apple orchards to pollinate the crops at certain times of the year.

Francine Stephanie Barron Mathews has written 22 books since her first Nantucket mystery came out 18 years ago. She wrote several of the mysteries and then switched to espionage thrillers based on her four years as a CIA analyst. She used her middle name and maiden name to write a new series in Jane Austen's style, an excuse to use the rich language of the time. Mathews finished the coursework for a Ph.D. in history at Stanford, but quit to pursue a writing career. She loves researching and writing fiction around stories of real people like Virginia Woolf and Jack Kennedy. Jack 1939 is the title of her next book coming out in the spring.