Lise McClendon
Lise McClendon is a fiction writer living in the Rocky Mountains of Montana. She has been a film reviewer, a film maker, a journalism professor, and a PR flack. Since her first novel, The Bluejay Shaman, in 1994, she has served on the national board of Mystery Writers of America and the International Association of Crime Writers/North America, as well as on faculty of the Jackson Hole Writers Conference where each year she critiques, speaks, and learns from writers new and old.
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Lise McClendon also writes as Rory Tate in the 2011 thriller, JUMP CUT. Her new novel by Rory Tate is PLAN X, available now. Read her latest novel, Château des Corbeaux, 17th in the Bennett Sisters mystery series that began with Blackbird Fly.
“I am a book.Sheaves pressed from the pulp of oaks and pinesa natural sawdust made dingy from purses, dustyfrom shelves.Steamy and anxious, abused and misused,kissed and cried over, smeared, yellowed, and torn,loved, hated, scorned. I am a book. I am a book that remembers,days when I stood proud in good companyWhen the children came, I leapt into their arms,when the women came, they cradled me against their soft breasts,when the men came, they held me like a lover,and I smelled the sweet smell of cigars and brandy as we sat together in leather chairs,next to pool tables, on porch swings, in rocking chairs,my words hanging in the air like bright gems, dangling,then forgotten, I crumbled,dust to dust. I am a tale of woe and secrets,a book brand-new, sprung from the loins of ancient fathers clothed in tweed,born of mothers in lands of heather and coal soot.A family too close to see the blood on its hands,too dear to suffering, to poison, to cold steel and revenge,deaf to the screams of mortal wounding,amused at decay and torment,a family bred in the dankest swamp of human desires. I am a tale of woe and secrets,I am a mystery. I am intrigue, anxiety, fear,I tangle in the night with madmen, spend my days cloaked in black,hiding from myself, from dark angels,from the evil that lurks withinand the evil we cannot lurk without. I am words of adventure,of faraway places where no one knows my tongue,of curious cultures in small, back alleys, mean streets,the crumbling house in each of us. I am primordial fear, the great unknown,I am life everlasting.I touch you and you shiver, I blow in your ear and you follow me,down foggy lanes, into places you've never seen,to see things no one should see,to be someone you could only hope to be.I ride the winds of imagination on a black-and-white horse,to find the truth inside of me, to cure the ills inside of you,to take one passenger at a time over that tall mountain,across that lonely plain to a place you've never beenwhere the world stops for just one minuteand everything is right.I am a mystery. -Rides a Black and White Horse”