There’s no better way to begin than with a simple “Hello.”
My name is April. I make my home in the piney woods of East Texas, where I homeschool my young children and do my best to keep things alive in our weedy garden. I’ve been married for more than 10 years, which feels like a very long time and not enough all at the same time.
I enjoy time and nature, and we seek out adventures as a family as much as possible. We’re lucky to live so near the beautiful state of Arkansas, where rivers, lakes and swimming holes offer a welcome refuge from our sweltering Texas summers.
All my life I’ve loved words. Now that I’m a home educator, I’m able to share my love with my children. Books have been some of my closest friends since earliest childhood, and now I’m getting to relive my favorite stories all over again as I read through them with my own children.
As a child, stories were a way to escape into other worlds and adventures, to explore places I could only imagine in dreams. As an adult, stories are a source of endless information, inspiration and connection. I read in order to immerse myself in the experience of others, to encounter new ideas, to grow in wisdom and empathy, and of course for the sheer pleasure of a well-turned phrase.
I write for all the same reasons. For as long as I can remember, I’ve received great satisfaction from the simple exercise of putting words onto paper (or on a screen, in more recent years). To put it simply, I write because I am compelled to do so; it is an impulse I can ignore no more than I can ignore hunger or thirst.
Once upon a time, I studied journalism at the University of Arkansas. I was a wide-eyed youth with ambitions to spend my adult life chasing down the next Big Story as a reporter. I wrote stories for our campus newspaper covering everything from smoking cessation drugs to tornado-ravaged towns, campus healthcare to biomedicine. I even interviewed author Salman Rushdie.
Life has a way of opening doors you never knew were there, and after getting married and moving to Austin, Texas, I found my personal dreams and ambitions shifting as well. We had a baby daughter, found jobs, and dove headfirst into Adulthood.
Now, after several years immersed in raising babies and toddlers, a big move from Austin back to our hometown in east Texas, and a few career transitions for both my husband and myself, I am again finding my voice as a writer.
I will always have a soft spot in my heart for solid news reporting – good lede will get me everytime – but now I am enjoying the freedom of fiction and creative non-fiction. You’ll find some results of that journey here in the form of personal blog posts as well as links to short stories and essays I have written on other sites.
I hope that my stories will inspire and entertain you. I hope you will connect with the words I share here and elsewhere.
Thank you for reading, and thank you for following along.
