My life has had many different chapters, but writing has always been a part of it. As a young girl in California I wanted to be a writer. World War II was raging. I hand wrote a mournful tale of love and sent it to a magazine. It was rejected. During grade school I was the editor of school newspapers and in high school wrote poetry and school news for the newspaper in the farming community of Hedrick, Iowa, where I lived with my sister and her husband.

Weekly worship services were a part of my early life but after we moved from California we left the church. I went to youth services with my friends.

Marrying shortly after graduation from high school I had three daughters. For 14 years I was a court reporter in the Adams County District Courts of Colorado and was so busy I was fortunate to write letters. Occasionally I would go back to church but I was sporadic until my life crumbled and I went through a divorce. At that time I recommitted my life to Jesus Christ. For the past 18 years my oldest daughter and I have lived together. We are good friends.

Court work and transcripts are demanding and unending. The desire to write was still with me so I enrolled in creative writing classes. My first successes were in small Christian publications.

In 1981 I decided to go back to secretarial work but soon discovered that with no knowledge of computers my experience was worthless outside of the courtroom. Desperate to find a means to support myself I started in college for the first time in 1982, signing up for computer classes, but I was drawn to the "fun" classes and changed my major to Arts. Thus I spent two happy years at Front Range Community College and then went to Metropolitan State College in Denver, taking journalism, writing, art and drama. I did take most of the required classes but because I kept putting off Math my financial aid ran dry before I got my degree.

Because I had battled depression I started studying the benefits of laughter and found that "A merry heart does good like a medicine." Since two of my daughters live outside of Colorado I have only seen their children once a year at the most. My daughter's son was growing up and I began teaching in Children's Churches, writing plays and stories for the kids. I took puppet classes, learned ventriloquism from a tape and was "Flower the Clown" for the County Fair and various other functions until Flower got tired. I like to write funny songs. I play the keyboard with a senior musical group where I often do comical and puppet songs.

While employed by Senior's Inc., working in the Commerce City Senior Center my boss asked me to start writing for the two local papers, so I wrote a column about events and interviews with seniors. One day I answered an ad to work for one of those papers, the Commerce City Express as a reporter. I was delighted when I was hired. Writing for newspapers is interesting, but it can be discouraging, especially when I work many hours to write a story and the editors don't use it.

Four years ago I started reporting for the Commerce City Beacon, a weekly Mom and Pop paper. For seven years now I have written personal memories, interviews and history of the area and a column entitled "Guess the Year" taken from old newspapers. If I get "writer's block" I ask my Partner for help. He never fails, the Lord gives me wonderful words to write.

I like people and love to be around them. For the past two and a half years I have been the teacher in a writing class for seniors in the Commerce City Recreation Senior Center.

I have self-published and printed for Christmas presents, three books of my personal columns. I published one small book of Commerce City history and sold copies of it.

My great, great Aunt Sarah told us wonderful stories of her life. One day I took my stenotype machine and recorded the stories she related. I wrote and illustrated a fictionalized account of those true stories. The Fence Posts magazine out of Greeley has informed me that they will publish them.

One of my greatest pleasures has been to write the stories that God has given me. Now I would like to share them with you.

Dorothy Miller