Rocky Mountain SCBWI Non-fiction Workshop was Wonderful!

And snowy!  Nancy Bo Flood was kind enough to share her cabin with me.  Here she is looking all American Gothic:

 

    Excellent presentations from Carolyn Yoder of Calkins Creek books, David Meissner, Laura Perdew, and Terri Farley.  I'm excited to get my Chipeta book polished up and sent off to Carolyn!

Springtime in the Shining Mountains

   The Shining Mountains is the Ute name for the Rockies.  All month I've been working on my picture book about Chipeta, a Ute woman I admire and almost feel I've come to know.
   I love to soak in the hot springs here just as she did, and I drive every weekend to Montrose, where she lived for years and where she's buried.  We both love babies and we both adopted sons, although I was also able to have children and she was not.
    Chipeta did gorgeous beadwork, and gave much of her work away to friends.  This is a detail of a piece that is displayed in the Historical Museum here in Glenwood Springs:

 

I hope to get a better photo when we can get the big heavy cabinet away from the wall so I won't be photographing it through the glass!

     Chipeta lived during a time of incredible change in the West, and she adapted with a cheerful heart and a generous spirit.  I'm taking my manuscript to an SCBWI non-fiction workshop in Boulder next weekend, an my roomie will be Nancy Bo Flood!