Paul Duerksen

I was first encouraged to write creatively by my eighth grade English teacher, a Mrs. Brown. Thanks to her (and other excellent high school teachers) I learned a love of reading good, serious literature, and experienced the joys of writing. I wrote poems for starters in high school, but was writing short stories before high school was over. I spent four and a half years in college earning a chemical engineering degree, and even there I found good writing skills were necessary (and on a weekly basis as a matter of fact). As a practicing engineer in Borger, Texas, I attended a local Methodist Church and soon began to experience a call to preach. I entered seminary in the winter of 1980, and in two and a half years I graduated, married, completed one fantasy novel and began another. As our children were born I took up creative writing again and wrote several short stories for them (on into the nineties). By then I was serving as a United Methodist Pastor in the New Mexico Conference so I began to write about my life experiences as a pastor in the places I found myself. I completed a graduate degree in 1988 and continued serving as a pastor until my retirement in 2011. From 2010 on I began to write short stories and books (mostly fiction), and through Amazon's Create Space found an easy publishing outlet. I'm currently working on books number 20 and 21. I currently work as a part-time assistant pastor at a church in southern New Mexico. And so here we are!