Me with Crowley at my daughter Jana's "Lazy Js Gato Ranch" in Dixie County, Florida
Crowley (sadly deceased) preferred to socialize with male visitors
About Me
Writing Influences or How I Came to Write 1. Introduction from a collection of short stories written as a Christmas
gift to my two younger brothers
As bedtime approaches in the mid-1940s in
our big old house in Webster Groves, Missouri, Mom tells us to get in bed with the lights out. But, it is hard for us to wind down. We are not tired yet; we want to have some more
fun. There is always a lot of running
around in the dark in our homemade pajamas; we get new flannel ones at
Christmas and shorties in the summer.
Mom can hear little feet running back and forth from bedroom to bedroom
and up and down the long hallway, with its long creaky strips of
polished oak. She uses Dad as
the ultimate threat. He comes stomping
up the stairs, scaring the heck out of us, so that when he gets to our rooms we
are under the covers with our eyes shut, George wheezing with his asthma. What can Dad do? However, when this repeats, he randomly swats one of us with his
belt and that is it, for the night. Is it always me? If there is trouble, it is George
who somehow starts it.
Joe and I share a bedroom on
the west side of the house. George has
his own room on the south side. Many
are the nights that Mom sits up with him, helping him breathe. Joe is a quiet little fellow with secret
candy stashes in his dresser drawers and a fondness for peanut butter. Myself, I am the good-looking one (on the left in the photo).
Eventually we do get to bed; then the story telling begins. There are lots
of weird stories, tales and other nonsense that I make up. Joe of course just laughs away at what
I say, and George is yelling from his room, “Louder, I can’t hear what you're
saying!”
As the
years go by they never stopped teasing me about the stories. Even now when I start to say something wild
and crazy they say, “Here he goes again.”
The tradition continues; I seem to have a knack and a noodle for strange stories. Most of them are written in two
to three hours. Often I lay in bed at
night with a story running through my head.
This only means that I can't sleep, so I get up, unknown to my wife,
Mary, turn on the computer to write down the essentials and then
go back to a sound
sleep.
2. An indication of artistic/writing skills comes in grade school
Long
before the giant, commercial educational-testing and evaluation business that seems
to dominate our present-day school systems, students in fourth grade
took what was called an
Aptitude Test. The results of the
test were compiled by the teachers, and the student was given a chart
that showed what areas he/she might most likely be skilled, or interested in.
Unlike most of the other students, my chart had two
very elevated peaks of equal height: Scientific and
Artistic/Writing. I always wondered about this test as life
progressed, particularly as the artistic/writing aptitude never seemed
to rise; science seemed to be dominant.
3. Aunt Madelyn Miller McLaughlin
Hardly
any of you have heard of Madelyn Miller McLaughlin, but most of
you are acquainted with her work as a sculptress. Ever see the
movie
Alien?
In her
mid-70s, Aunt Madelyn lived in North Hollywood, CA, where she sculpted
that horrific creature from conceptual drawings by
H.R Giger. When I
visited her, she showed
me photographs of her other, earlier sculpted versions of the Alien.
She also developed the giant moray eel in the movie
The Deep, and did much of the setwork design for the movie
Exodus.
When Madelyn was a little girl in
Edina, Missouri (Knox County), she
could often be found along a small creek near the family farm, making
small dolls and other objects from the residual glacial clays found along the
bank. Her daughter, my cousin,
Joan Hanley, is a noted artist and sculptress in
La Veta, Colorado.
So, why do I tell you this? There is a trend here, perhaps genetic programming?
4. Great, Great Grandfather Bernard Müller
Not
a great amount is known about the early life of my German-French great
great grandfather Bernard
(Bernhardt) Müller (1799-1885). He arrived in the U.S. at
age 49, a widower with five children, coming through Castroville,
Texas, and eventually settling in southeastern Iowa as a farmer.
However, on the
French passport he used to come
to the US from
Marckolsheim, Alsace in 1849, his occupation is stated as '"
glazier"
or glass
maker (perhaps installer in buildings/churches), an artist or
craftsman. Another genetic (?) clue that there was a background of artistic skils and imagination that drove me
toward
writing.
5. My Son, Daughter and Granddaughter -- Plus my wife, Mary
Chris Miller,
my son, is a graphic artist and web page designer and coordinator of
electronic music concerts (
http://electronicsubsouth.com/) in
Gainesville, Florida. My
daughter,
Jana Miller,
is a graphic artist for the US Geological Survey, also in Gainesville
and is a long-term, almost professional, photographer. Liz
Miller, my
granddaughter shows artistic signs.
Mary, my wife, while not genetically related, is a birder and overall
nature freak. She runs an extensive bluebird monitoring program
of 41 nestboxes at Flatwoods Park in Tampa, FL.
6. John Miller the Geologist
What happened? Why did I become a geologist, rather than a
writer? Why was the writer in me delayed? Check out the navigation bar at
the top/bottom of this page, Geologist.
