Biography

A native of Colorado, Anne Ralston skied in the winter, fished in the summer, and graduated in Boulder one August day in 1969 before joining the Peace Corps. One of Anne’s novels, God’s Time, is anchored by the three-year experience as a volunteer in Liberia, West Africa. Joy, a novella in the Absentminded series, blends both skiing in Colorado and the boundaries placed on Muslim women as Anne observed them in Africa.

Anne taught high school English and history while in the Peace Corps and middle-school reading while on the Jicarilla Apache Indian Reservation the year after her return to the states. Anne married Harry, the love of her life whom she met in Liberia, and moved to Teague, Texas to be with him. Harry managed industrial construction which led to the couple’s relocation, on average, every two years.

For the sheer fun of it, Anne produced an early version of Crestfallen in 1975 in Delaware while earning a master’s degree as reading specialist. Harry’s company next posted the couple in Gulfport, Mississippi, where the first Absentminded story, Assassin, materialized.

Anne attended Mississippi State University to study secondary reading and, during that year, Anne lost her first pregnancy. In the process of grieving that loss, she encountered God. A portion of the second Absentminded story, Geranium Lady, narrates a character’s shock as she discovers that there really is a God and a loving, forgiving one at that.

Anne gave birth to her first and only child in Aiken, South Carolina. When the baby reached eight months, Anne and Harry moved to Jefferson City, Missouri. It was 1981. In the previous year, the Shah’s rue in Iran had fallen and Russia had invaded Afghanistan. Because Assassin, the first of the Absentminded stories, began in that very region, its heroine, it seemed to Anne, needed to return to Iran, Turkmenistan, and Afghanistan in the midst of 1979-80 turmoil. Thus emerged Qanat. During this time, another Absentminded story, Duct Tape, bubbled up following a visit to the Minnesota lake country. Also in Missouri, a congregation and its clergy stirred Anne to consider Episcopal priesthood.

The-powers-that-be placed Anne and Harry for entire decade in Rochester, New, York, one of the few American cities with an Episcopal seminary. This allowed Anne to complete the ordination process. Crestfallen blossomed into a novel during her seminary church history courses. Tassels, a mystery story, hinges on the floor plan of the one-time Rochester Divinity School. Without ordination, God’s Time, could never have been written.

Harry with Anne then moved to Wynne, Arkansas, a town forty-miles due east of Memphis and stayed there for two years. The emergence of Troy McIntyre, who appears as Lisa’s business partner in the last three Absentminded stories, had been a twinkling possibility since Gulfport, but one which Arkansas sharply honed.

After far too brief a stay (four months) in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, Harry and Anne moved to Thailand. The civility of a woman’s book club in Arkansas blended with courage modeled by female expats in Thailand to inform the second to last of the Absentminded stories, Salvaging Tanya.

When Harry retired to Denver, Anne served, for a while, as a chaplain in a women’s correctional facility. Anne’s familiarity with the “inside” refined the portion of Salvaging Tanya where the protagonist endures eight months of Thai incarceration.

Anne’s stories and characters have common threads. Undercover work for her characters attracts Anne as it provides a persistent conflict between their desire to be authentic and the dishonesty required by the role they must play. Anne’s years in church diplomacy support her ability to write with authority about that tension. Strong female protagonists often risk their lives in violent situations to accomplish peaceful goals. The men her female characters attract must surrender their desire to possess and protect “their women.” Each learns incrementally how to support their beloved’s cause, even when the cause endangers her.

Anne believed for many years that publishing any of her works would damage her career as both teacher and priest. Love-making outside of wedlock, though fictional, would nevertheless deeply distress key parishioners. That some of her characters were not heterosexual would have offended religiously conservative parents. And, the endorsement of several of the world religions as equals to Christianity would have caused apoplexy in more than a few of her fellow priests. These issues no longer hold sway as both the church and the schools have moved on, and Anne has retired. That is why publishing now seems appropriate.