Dean Robertson

I am seventy-three years old, a retired English teacher, a mother, a grandmother, and--unexpectedly--a writer.

I have kept bees, raised llamas, and built a sweat lodge. I have spent two weeks at a time, silent and fasting, at yoga retreats in the mountains of New Mexico.

I was born in Alabama and grew up on 200 acres of deep woods in North Georgia. I have lived on the West Coast, right across Highway One from the Pacific Ocean, and I have lived on St. Simons Island, within sight of the Atlantic Ocean. I have lived and taught in Kentucky and Michigan. Today, home is a 1928 co-op building in Norfolk, Virginia.

I spent thirty years of my life teaching literature in independent secondary schools and in small private colleges.

When I retired,I cut off my schoolteacher's bun and headed to the Tidewater region of Virginia

At the end of 2012 I had a terrible fall. I spent eight very long months in an assisted living facility. The name of that facility is The Lydia Roper Home.

My first book, "Looking for Lydia; Looking for God," was a work of non-fiction about the women I got to know at the Lydia Roper Home, about Lydia and John Roper, and about Norfolk after the Civil War.

After a pointless legal hassle, it was released by Koehler Books in 2015. If you read it hoping for the juicy bits that would cause the Methodists to try to stop publication, you will be sorely disappointed.

In spite of extensive research, I found very little about Lydia Roper, so I decided to try my hand at fiction. As her great-great-granddaughter wisely suggested, perhaps I would find Lydia by imagining her.

My next two books, "Jessie, The Adventures and Insights of a Nineteenth-Century Woman," and "Jessie: The Further Adventures," were my Lydia novels.

During the past year, I have completed two novels, both based loosely on my family. I have not published them, nor have I sent them to publishers. I have entered them in a few literary competitions. Last year one got an honorable mention in the Faulkner-Wisdom Contest, just low enough on the totem pole to mean I can resubmit in 2020 with a substantial rewrite.

I am currently turning what is essentially a novel of character into a murder myself. It's proving to be hard work.

In the meantime, I have built two websites. One, deanspeaksout.com, is a blog. The other, creatingyourimages.com, is a website for an online business selling one-of-a-kind photographic creations.

I write every day.