Celia Hayes was brought up in an eccentric, baby-boom family, and earned a degree in English Literature (California State University, Northridge) before an un-slaked thirst for adventure and foreign travel led her to enlist in the United States Air Force.
Of her life before writing full time Celia says “I was a radio and television broadcast technician, and sometime Public Affairs troop, and served for 20 years in places as various as Greece, Spain, Japan, Korea, Greenland and Ogden, Utah, in a wide assortment of duties and pleasures which included midnight alt-rock DJ, TV news anchor, video-production librarian, radio and television writer and producer, production manager…. and base tour guide. On one completely colorful occasion, I drove a bright orange Volvo sedan across Western Europe from Athens to Zaragoza, Spain, accompanied only by a small and cranky child.
In 2002, I started writing for the military-oriented weblog, “Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief” (now “The Daily Brief”) at www.ncobrief.com, writing essays and commentary on matters historical, personal, political, cultural, literary and military under the “nom du blog” of “Sgt. Mom”. I took it over as senior editor/manager in 2004, while working as an office administrator and manager, catalog editor, executive secretary and classical music announcer, before I decided that writing full-time was what I really, really wanted to be doing. My memoir “Our Grandpa Was an Alien” grew out of nostalgic essays that I wrote for the blog. My historical novel “To Truckee’s Trail” also grew out of a series of essays for that blog.”
Her ”Adelsverein Trilogy” (the story of the German colonies in the Texas Hill Country) grew out of interest in the founding of the town of Fredericksburg, Texas. “Daughter of Texas”, her latest book – the epic story of a woman’s life in early Texas- was released on San Jacinto Day – April 21, 2011. The sequel, “Deep in the Heart” will be available early in December, 2011.
Of why she writes about the American frontier and the 19th century, she says, “The 19th century made us what we are, what we would become. At the beginning of it, the United States was a handful of loosely organized states, clinging to the Atlantic seaboard, just beginning to spill over the barrier of the Appalachians. People lived very much as their ancestors had, by candle-light; traveled by horse or ox-team, powered their mills and ships by water and wind. News traveled only as quickly as a fast courier on horseback could go; it took six months to get a letter from the other side of the continent. And by the end of that century – the United States had spread to the shores of the Pacific, railways spanned the continent, and news arrived instantaneously by telegraph; electric light, powered air flight, factories turning out everything from cloth to automobiles, movie shows . . . and it would have been possible for someone to have experienced all that, in their lifetime!
“I tell stories about our past, because we need to be reminded about how incredible, what a miracle that our existence as a nation was and is. We need to remember our past, our heroes and heroines, to be inspired and reassured by their example. To live without a sense of history, is to live in a kind of cultural sensory-deprivation tank. We need stories, and we need to remember!”
