Georgia Ann Mullen

In 1971 something happened at work one day that crawled under my skin and started to itch. My employer fired a woman for being pregnant. “She should have known better” than to apply for the position, said the HR director—a female.

I never forgot the surprise of suddenly not seeing that young woman at her desk. Nor the shock of learning why she’d been abruptly terminated. So began my slow education about women's rights--or lack of them.

I graduated from Ohio University with a degree in journalism. Women's Studies programs were just beginning and I don't remember if OU had one. I never took a course directed specifically at women.

So after 16 years of formal education, I knew little about the women's rights movement. I didn't learn about the First Woman's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls in 1848 until I was in my mid-thirties. No teacher or professor ever stood in front of class and told me Alice Paul and Lucy Burns were tortured and imprisoned for peacefully picketing the White House in 1917. Aren't these important dates in American history?

All my studies about women have been learned on my own, in between working as a newspaper reporter, magazine writer and editor. My five-year stint as editor of a regional magazine in western New York took me to Seneca Falls, where ideas for A Shocking & Unnatural Incident blossomed. When that book ended, I realized the story wasn't finished so I wrote and published Wixumlee Is My Salvation. The third book in the trilogy, Stolen, was written as a standalone and has been well received by book clubs.

Taking a dramatic turn, I published The Loggerhead Murders, which won first place in a Writer's Digest competition for mystery/thrillers. The mystery has also been well received, one reader commenting that, "I didn't want it to end." Well, it ended when the killer was caught, but I certainly appreciate the sentiment.

I am currently working on Murder at the Psychedelic Hospice.