M Corinne Corley

M. Corinne Corley comes from Jennings, Missouri. A child of the 1950s and 1960s, Corley has faced challenges but counted blessings for the last sixty-seven years. She began writing in early elementary school shortly after she learned to read. Her parents settled her in front of books, magazines, and newspapers because doctors had speculated that she would not overcome a childhood illness sufficiently to walk. But walk she does, at least after a fashion. Her writing career began in 1970 with an essay for a Christian youth magazine in which she postulated God as a neuter gender being, for which the magazine paid $5.00. Corley wended her way through life, from St. Louis to Boston and back; west to Kansas City, south to Arkansas, back north with a baby, and eventually, settled in Brookside, an historic old neighborhood south of the Country Club Plaza, to raise her son and fight for the rights of seemingly disparate groups, such as men wishing to be equal custodians and children living in abuse or chaos. After a long, cherished, and sometimes amusing career as a Missouri attorney, she closed her law practice, sold her 100-year-old Brookside bungalow, and decamped to Northern California in a tiny house on wheels named “Angel’s Haven”. There, she moonlights in the back office of a California attorney. She also organizes community events out on the Delta Loop, on one of the islands created by winding rivers flowing to and from the Bay area sixty miles east of the Pacific Ocean with which Corley fell in love while visiting Stanford for specialty care. She has one child, three ex-husbands, and a solid tribe of friends without whom her life would be a wasteland of boredom and anxiety. You can find her most summers on a levee road in the hanging from her car door trying to capture the perfect photograph of a lone egret among the lofty piles of hyacinth floating down the San Joaquin River.