Martha Whitmore Hickman

I'd like to tell you a little about myself and my family and what my life is like now--very different than when I had four young children scurrying about!

I live in Los Altos, California with my husband, Hoyt, and No Pets. We've had various kinds of pets over the years--at first, containable in cages or a terrarium (chameleons, hamsters, snakes, turtles, an ant farm, guinea pigs) and then we graduated to a cat. We once took a snake--carefully covered in a terrarium in the back of a station wagon--on a family trip to Canada.

But I am getting behind myself. "What my life is like now," I said.

I am a woman "of a certain age." I never knew just what that meant--implications of subterfuge? Not necessarily. I am a wife and mother, a grandmother, a traveller. I am the author of 28 published books, let alone those several wondrous books on my shelf that benighted publishers have turned down, and numerous articles and stories in a variety of journals.

I grew up in Massachusetts, in a fine family of six. I graduated from college (with a major in English Composition), got a job in publishing for three years, met a wonderful man who had been discharged from the Navy and had college to finish. We were married when he was part way through Yale Divinity
School. For a while I taught nursery school and then, in due course (nice ambiguous phrase) we had four children--three sons and a daughter.

"No, I wanted to be a wife and mother when I grew up." By now I was unquestionably that. And I was doing a little writing on the side.

But when our daughter started to school, I began to think, "Well, maybe..." and I bought a desk from the Salvation Army and set myself up in the large upstairs hall and thought, "If I can sell something within a year, that will be a sign."

Well, I did--an article about a cancer scare, and then I wrote more articles and short stories and then an editor connected me with an agent and, the first time out, she sold my book, which came to be titled, "How to Marry A Minister." The throng of people wanting to know that was not huge, but nevertheless the book did reasonably well, and I was on my way. Then a children's book, "I'm Moving," which won a juvenile award from Friends of American Writers, and I got to go to Chicago and sit on the platform and eat my chicken and peas and make a speech, and I was so excited I forgot to peel off my nametag and wondered why everyone on the airplane coming home was smiling.

I had started a novel by now and had a book of personal essays lined up, when something terrible happened which affected my writing, my choice of subject matter, every aspect of my life. One bright summer afternoon, while our family was on vacation in the Colorado mountains, my daughter, who by now had grown into a beautiful young woman of almost seventeen, fell from a horse and died.

As I have been able, groping my way through this tragedy, I have written about it--for awhile I had no other agenda--in a novel, in short stories, in essays, in poetry, even, in transmuted form, in children's books.

All of that was a long time ago. Had she lived, my daughter would be a middle-aged woman. I am grateful for the way my writing has helped absorb some of my grief and for the way it has ennabled me to reach out in love and consolation to thousands of people I will never know.

Our family has come together to love and uphold one another. Our three sons, who were so devastated by the death of their sister, have become mature and fine men, created families and lives of their own. They have married, become loving husbands and fathers--(We now have six grandchildren!)--found useful and congenial careers. One is a Captain, based in Detroit, with Northwest Airlines; one is Director of Financial Planning for Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA; and one is a geo-physicist with the Office of Earthquake Studies of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, CA. My husband, after serving as pastor of a succession of local churches and then as a staff member of one of the national boards of the church is retired and busy with writing and research of his own.

A couple of years ago, after thirty-four years of living in Nashville,Tennessee, we began to think seriously about moving closer to one of our children, and after repeated urgings from our California son and his wife to move close to them we sold our house in Tennessee and moved to a retirement community in Los Altos. We have lived here now for a little more than a year and feel blest to be here--a congenial community, on a beautiful campus, with more than enough interesting and challenging activities, and the promise of continuing medical care as we need it--and our son and family a fifteen minute drive away!
And time to write, as I feel moved to do that.

"Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?" the question comes back.
"No, but it has been a wonderful second vocation for me---as close to`having it all' as I could wish." But you can read more about it in the books! I hope you will.

Martha