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saddlebag dispatches
D E S T I N AT I O N
PARRIS KEEPING UP WITH NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR PARRIS AFTON BONDS IS NOT FOR THE FEINT OF HEART.
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inning down New York Times bestselling author Parris Afton Bonds to an interview is like trapping a whirlwind. She is always on the verge of a happy dance. It proved challenging to rein her in long enough to talk about herself. She told me her dream as a child was to be a ballerina, a nurse, or a flight attendant, not necessarily in that order. Then it occurs to her that when she was five she wrote her first story. Three pages. “But I didn’t think it was any good. My mother knew I had the talent, so she kept it.” She would be 26 years old and staying home with the children before her mother’s belief would come true. “We moved to Old Mexico and I sold my first article there, but no one knew but me and my postman. I interviewed a secretary at the American
Embassy and sold the article to Modern Secretary. I was bored and thought, why not write? It was too cool to get patted down by the guards at the Embassy.” She says she got lucky when she sold her first book, Sweet Golden Sun. “When I look back on it now, it’s not very good.” Because of her husband’s job Parris has traveled around the world, probably more than once, and when you read one of her books you can bet on the realism of the locale. From Australia to Scotland, from early America to the historical west and locales in between, her stories ring true. She has a way of telling even the strongest fiction as if it really happened and it’s easy to believe it did. This portion of a forward from Tame the Wildest Heart explains why her stories convince the reader they very well could have happened.
velda brotherton
