J.B. Palmer

I was raised in a small town in South Carolina. I was the youngest child of my dad's second marriage to a woman 21 years younger than he was. My childhood was steeped in religion and tempered by poverty. My parents believed a girl's goal in life should be to marry a good man and have his babies. Education beyond high school was not an option. I loved to write, even had some poems published as an older teenager. But, eventually, I laid down my pen and did as I was raised. I married and had babies - four of them. When my children were older, I started writing a newspaper column. That satisfied a need I had squelched for so long. Then my son wrote a play for a local theater group based on a short story I had written. They asked for another. I wrote one. He told me that was book material, and that's how it all began.