Michele Poague

My parents lived in Denver in 1956 and often went home for the holidays. My uncle Jim was totally freaked out driving 800 miles, in the dead of winter, through Nebraska farm land, with a woman who could go into labor at any minute, so I was born Michele Rae Jeffryes in Newman Grove, Nebraska.

I grew up in southwest Denver with 5 sisters and a brother. Of course in the 1960's, that meant somewhere near 1st and Federal. Now southwest Denver is closer to Chatfield Reservoir. I was fifteen when I was spirited away by my mother and stepfather to the strange land of Sioux Falls, SD, where I wrote my first short story. It was a paranormal romance about the ghost of a man's first wife trying to kill his second wife. Like so many things teenagers write, it was never meant for publication.

After college, when I was twenty-one, I moved to Las Vegas for six years where I worked in the Bar & Night Club business, and then returned to Denver in 1984. I like the weather here.

I had read the Dragonriders of Pern, and Anne McCaffrey made writing look easy. It wasn't. In the 80's and 90's I didn't have the time to write because I had a house to remodel, a career I had to invent, and a world to change through politics. As a fundraising director I wrote and designed convention brochures, and while working for Shotgun Willies, I wrote training manuals and ad copy. I'm still employed with Shotgun Willies, but my work leans more toward management and accounting now.