Tamora's Early Days

I was born in South Connellsville, Fayette County, Pennsylvania, on December 13, 1954, which makes me a Sagittarius, if you believe in such things. For those who look to eastern tradition, I was born in the Year of the Horse. My mother wanted to name me "Tamara," but the nurse who filled out my birth certificate had never heard of such a fancy name (we are talking Pennsylvania coal country in the 1950s), so she misspelled it, and I legitimately became Tamora (pronounced like "camera"). I actually like it better than Tamara, which means "graceful" and "a palm tree," and is the name of a Russian saint. I am none of these things.

I was my parents' first child, born into a long, proud line of hillbillies on my dad's side of the family (the Pierces and the Prices, the best people on earth), and a family which was ashamed of its hillbilly roots and told my mother she married beneath her. (They know who they are.) I was five when my sister Kimberly came along (the one I based on Alanna), and six when Melanie was born. My dad worked for the telephone company while my mother did something pretty unusual for that time and place: she went to college for her degree in English, intending to become a teacher. I remember it thusly: when my mother was in school, the babysitter let me watch "Robin Hood" before I went to school--my sisters got to watch the second half of "Captain Kangaroo" after I left; if my mother was home, my sisters got to watch all of "Captain Kangaroo," and I could whine about "Robin Hood" till the cows came home, for all the good it did me.

We were poor, but I didn't know it then. Everyone in Dunbar, where we lived from the time I was five until I was eight, was pretty much in the same basket. We had a garden where my folks grew fruit and vegetables; our water came from a well (I used to amuse myself by dropping pebbles through the hole in the cement cover); my parents made their own root beer; my dad kept homing pigeons; we always had dogs and cats, and one rainy day I watched our cat produce five new cats, just like magic. We always had plenty of books. My uncle gave us a set of World Book encyclopedias, and a special treat for me was looking through them, even before I could read. My uncle also gave me my first personal books, WINNIE THE POOH, THE HOUSE AT POOH CORNER, NOW WE ARE SIX, and WHEN WE WERE VERY YOUNG. I also had Dr. Seuss books, HORTON HEARS A WHO, YERTLE THE TURTLE (which is still one of my favorites), THE CAT IN THE HAT and THE CAT IN THE HAT COMES BACK (which gave me nightmares--it seemed like the cat always came to visit when my parents left me to watch my sisters), but the Milne books were my very own, and I read them until they fell apart. Books are still the main yardstick by which I measure true wealth.

In June, 1963, my parents bundled us up and we drove to California, where my dad had gotten a transfer. I've blocked out a lot of that trip. For one thing, I couldn't read. Two weeks with no books! I tried, but every time I did, I got carsick. I'm surprised I remember anything. What I do remember is: the bumper coming off our VW bus in Ohio. The marshlands campground in Missouri where I saw my first waterlilies and egret, and lost my habit of sucking my thumb because my mother soaked us all in bug repellent. The sandstorm (dust storm?) in Kansas. Going to shower at the campground in Colorado Springs at six in the morning and discovering, much too late, that there was only one kind of water: cold. Very cold. Very, very cold! And the signs for Carson City, Nevada, with the California border close at hand.

Our first house was in San Mateo, right on El Camino Real. Our second was on the other side of the San Francisco peninsula, in Miramar. We lived there for half a year, in El Granada a full year, and then three years in Burlingame. There was always cool stuff--looking at the animals in tidal pools, watching the surfers at sunset, flying kites, my dad reading Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" one night as the fog rolled in and the foghorns blew, but under it all was my parents' fighting.

My dad probably saved my sanity one day when I was in sixth grade, a year before he moved out. He heard me telling myself stories as I did dishes, and he suggested that I try to write some of them down. He even gave me an idea to start with, a book about travels in a time machine (we both loved history and television shows like the original "Star Trek," so he knew what would grab me). The next year, as I was still scribbling my own stories, my English teacher (bless you, Mrs. Jacobsen!) introduced me to The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkein. I got hooked on fantasy, and then on science fiction, and both made their way into my stories. I tried to write the kind of thing I was reading, with one difference: the books I loved were missing teenaged girl warriors. I couldn't understand this lapse of attention on the part of the writers I loved, so until I could talk them into correcting this small problem, I wrote about those girls, the fearless, bold, athletic creatures that I was not, but wanted so badly to be.

I wrote reams of stories: I wrote "Star Trek" stories, "Here Come the Brides" stories, "Time Tunnel" stories, Tolkein and Howard and Moorcock and Heinlein and Bradbury stories. (In those days nobody ever thought of calling them fan fics!) And I wrote my own, which were mishmoshes of all the above. I didn't worry about the fact that whatever I wrote often read like the thing I'd read and loved most recently; I was just trying to entertain myself and block out the long train wreck of my parents' divorce. In 1969 my mother took my sisters and me back to Fayette County, to a world and a way of living I had forgotten.