grew up in Springfield, Missouri, on a steady diet of Bible stories and old TV westerns. Maybe that's why I like to write about the past. Or maybe it was Jo March in Little Women. She was a tomboy and bookworm – just like me. But somehow she managed to become a writer. And almost from the very beginning, that's what I wanted to be, too. My first real job was as a newspaper staff writer on an old fashioned Society page. I wrote about weddings and Girl Scout jamborees and old ladies who carved little statues out of gourds. Then I moved to South Dakota, where the job market for Society page writers was pretty slim. So I began a career in advertising and public relations.
Over the next twenty years, I wrote about everything from Mount Rushmore to Water Piks, Navajo rugs to basketball shoes. Along the way, I lived in Kansas, Colorado, and Oregon.
Then in 1994, I left the corporate world behind and started writing books for young adults. Ghost Horses was published two years later.
I continue to write Young Adult fiction, but have just published my first book for adult readers, Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer's Life. I live in Portland, Oregon, with a pair of devoted and lively flat-coated retrievers. My husband Richard died of prostate cancer in 2005; our daughter is a mathematician who lives and works in Portland.
So like Jo March, I’ve become an “American authoress.” But the journey has been longer, harder, and more fulfilling than I ever imagined all those years ago when I first read Little Women
Pamela and her husband Richard on their last walk together in October 2005.
