Sometimes, life can be absurd. Take the day my principal called me into his office.

“There aren’t enough students in your department.”

This I knew as my journalism and communications classes were rather small.

“We can’t pay two teachers if there aren’t enough students.” He clasped his hands together on the desk. Still, I wasn’t worried. After all, I had a degree in communications and I’d been a reporter for almost 15 years in TV and print. My peer in the department did have a background in video editing, though he’d been an English teacher. But, of course, he had seniority.

“You have two choices.”

Uh oh! I got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“You can move to another school in the district or you can be a reading teacher.”

I leaned back in my chair. “Reading? I can’t teach that!”

He spread his hands. “Then you’ll have to go somewhere else.”

“I have a history cert,” I said hopefully. “I love history!”

“Coaches teach history,” he said as if that statement made sense.

“You don’t understand…”

“That’s all I can offer you right now. You’ll have to get a reading certification. That’s about 15 credits, but you can teach on an emergency cert right now.”

“But…”

He stared at me.

“I’m dyslexic.”

“You’ll figure it out.”

I liked my school, despite the Title I issues that identified my students as children who lived below the poverty line. But how could I teach reading?

When I was in elementary school, no one tossed around words like dyslexia. If you couldn’t read well you were just stupid and lazy. I was the offspring of parents who both had college degrees. I watched my dad get his master’s when I was eight and my mother was the only women in our neighborhood who had an education and a job. Every morning they read the now-defunct Newark News at the breakfast table and the New York Times during cocktail hour. The West Essex Tribune was also part of their repertoire. Along with my brother and sister, they both loved to read books.

But, for me, the thought of reading for pleasure seemed absurd. I struggled through fifth grade before my parents actually noticed. A D in Social Studies sounded the alarm bells and my parents placed me in a summer school class called Work and Study Skills. There I learned to take notes and be more organized, though I don’t recall anyone ever saying I was dyslexic, nor being tested for reading problems.

Here’s the thing about dyslexia. It looks different depending on who has it. Like autism, it’s a broad spectrum. Some sufferers will never read well. Others have barely noticeable quirks. I’m of the low-level variety. My spelling sucks. I get easily distracted. I turn certain letters around. (I can’t tell the difference between a lower-case d and b if they’re in an unfamiliar word.) I have trouble when I’m stressed distinguishing right from left, which my crew-mates in football found hilarious when, as the referee, I would signal first down or penalties in the wrong direction. Sometimes, I struggle to put the right shoe on the correct foot. And I’m pretty bad with numbers. I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked when one of my news directors called me into his office to inquire about why I kept reading the sports scores wrong every night on the news. After that, I had to write my scores out in words. Yes, it took a lot of extra time which had me sliding onto the news set seconds before the red camera light blinked on, but at least I had a better chance of getting the scores right.

As you can imagine, I felt like a complete fraud the day I stood in front of a reading class for the first time. My students were mostly freshman who read between the kindergarten and sixth-grade levels. My job was to figure out why and make them ready for high school. Sometimes their issues were physical. They had undiagnosed hearing or vision problems. Sometimes they were kids who didn’t speak English. Others had various learning and emotional disabilities. Many came from homes where there were no books or magazines or pencils or paper and where they never witnessed an adult reading anything.

I began taking classes to get my reading certification, and the day I learned about dyslexia was shocking and wonderful. Wonderful, because there was finally an explanation.

I looked back over the adjustments I’d made to improve my reading skills over the years. When I prepared to head off to college the first time, my older brother’s words rang in my head. “You’re to stupid to go to college,” he said. “I bet you 20 bucks you’ll flunk out the first semester.”

Since I would have rather been hit by a truck than let my brother win, I went to work. Through trial and error, I learned that I could never stay up all night to pass an exam. I had to get a good night’s sleep. I had to study for short periods of time every day, beginning a week before a big test. I couldn’t listen to music or be around noise, or I’d get distracted. I had to take lots of notes and always go to class.

I taught reading for about five years and I often pointed out to my students that I had a reading disability. “If I can do it, so can you,” I’d say.

And then some of them would sit up a little straighter in their seats and nod. Turns out believing you can learn to read is the most important step you can take.

The past and present collide when a tenacious reporter seeks information on an eleventh century magician…and uncovers more than she bargained for.

WOLF CATCHER

Anne Montgomery

Historical Fiction/Suspense

TouchPoint Press

February 2, 2022

In 1939, archeologists uncovered a tomb at the Northern Arizona site called Ridge Ruin. The man, bedecked in fine turquoise jewelry and intricate bead work, was surrounded by wooden swords with handles carved into animal hooves and human hands. The Hopi workers stepped back from the grave, knowing what the Moochiwimi sticks meant. This man, buried nine hundred years earlier, was a magician.

Former television journalist Kate Butler hangs on to her investigative reporting career by writing freelance magazine articles. Her research on The Magician shows he bore some European facial characteristics and physical qualities that made him different from the people who buried him. Her quest to discover The Magician’s origin carries her back to a time when the high desert world was shattered by the birth of a volcano and into the present-day dangers of archeological looting where black market sales of antiquities can lead to murder.

REVIEW COPIES OF WOLF CATCHER AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

Review/interview requests: media@touchpointpress.com

Get your copy where you buy books.

“Anne Montgomery is, in my opinion, a master storyteller…Her writing is at once refreshing, gritty and absorbing and leaves me shocked, concerned for the characters yet satisfied at an amazing novel.”

Katherine Hayward Perez

Just Catherine

Find the rest of the review here.

ANCIENT RUINS, HAUNTED MEMORIES, AND A RUTHLESS CRIMINAL COMBINE WITH A TOUCH OF MYSTIC PRESENCE IN THIS TAUT MYSTERY ABOUT A CRIME WE ALL MUST ADDRESS.

THE CASTLE

Anne Montgomery

TouchPoint Press

Contemporary Women’s Fiction/Suspense

September 13, 2021

Maggie, a National Park Ranger of Native American descent, is back at The Castle—an ancient pueblo carved into a limestone cliff in Arizona’s Verde Valley. Maggie, who suffers from depression, has been through several traumas: the gang rape she suffered while in the Coast Guard, the sudden death of her ten-year-old son, and a suicide attempt.

One evening, she chases a young Native American boy through the park and gasps as he climbs the face of The Castle cliff and disappears into the pueblo. When searchers find no child, Maggie’s friends believe she’s suffering from depression-induced hallucinations.

Maggie has several men in her life. The baker, newcomer Jim Casey, who always greets her with a warm smile and pink boxes filled with sweet delicacies. Brett Collins, a scuba diver who is doing scientific studies in Montezuma Well, a dangerous cylindrical depression that houses strange creatures found nowhere else on Earth. Dave, an amiable waiter with whom she’s had a one-night stand, and her new boss Glen.

One of these men is a serial rapist and Maggie is his next target. In a thrilling and terrifying denouement, Maggie faces her rapist and conquers her worst fears once and for all.

REVIEW COPIES OF THE CASTLE AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST
Contact: media@touchpointpress.com

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Dear Folks in Charge of Those Five Colorful Rings,

I’m writing to you because, well, I’m concerned.

Let me start by pointing out that my first dream was to one day step up on that middle podium, a gold-medal around my neck. The national anthem would blare in the background while excited fans showered me with colorful bouquets. That I was a decidedly mediocre ice skater did not deter me in the least. When that dream died, rather early in retrospect, I continued to watch those Olympic competitors with awe and not a little bit of envy.

Now, I feel badly saying this, but your rings have lost some of their luster. I’m hoping you can fix it, so I can continue to be astounded by the breathtaking skills these athletes display.

The first issue is almost too depressing to talk about: cheating! How could you let gold-medal-favored singles skater Kamila Valieva compete after she failed a drug test back in December? The fifteen-year-old Russian was found with a cocktail of performance-enhancing drugs in her system. One was a heart medication that could increase her endurance.

I know what you’re thinking. “Valieva is just a child. It’s not her fault.” While you’re right, we still can’t ignore cheating. That the adults in her sphere had no compunction against doping a child is despicable. The excuse given—that she drank from a water glass her grandfather used after taking trimetazidine—is laughable, and not in a funny way. That the drug can cause lowered blood pressure, vomiting, nausea, indigestion, headaches, and liver dysfunction points out that the girl is being abused. Anybody who participated in her doping needs to be arrested and punished and never allowed near children ever again.

And speaking of children…it’s time to put an age limit on all Olympic sports. I can hear a lot of you moaning about how good 14-and-15-year-olds are at flipping through space, but I ask you, if they are mature enough to survive the pressures of the world stage, why do we always see them nervously clutching stuffed animals as they wait for their scores? Answer: They’re just kids.

I have spent much of my life in the sports world, as both a sports reporter and an amateur official in football, baseball, ice hockey, soccer, and basketball. I have seen more helicopter sports parents then I care to remember, and during my time skating I saw quite clearly what their kids were forced to give up. While I was going to high school football games and summer camp and taking music lessons and roaming free in the woods with my dog, these children were prisoners. They skated 365 days a year. They were on strict diets and were tutored so school didn’t get in the way of training. They were like caged animals, constantly under the supervision of adults who hoped to ride their skating costumes to fame and fortune.

The thing is, none of them ever got that far. Their dreams ended without Olympic glory, has-beens as teenagers. Here’s what I know after spending 20 years teaching in high school. Those years are when we find out what we like to do, what we’re good at, and what someone might pay us to do. For athletes focused so narrowly on one prize, other skills are often left to deteriorate. When the Olympic dream fades, they don’t have much left.

With that in mind, let’s say that only those 18 and older can compete on the international stage. Since the athletes would be adults, the blame when doping surfaces would fall squarely on their shoulders. The age limit would also allow them to grow and mature, which in turn might help stem some of the mental health issues that have been popping up in athletes of late.

Finally, we need to think hard about what countries get to host the games. In 2013, six cities bid on the 2022 Winter Olympics. By 2015, four cities had dropped out, leaving just Beijing, China and Almaty, Kazakhstan, countries that rate poorly when it comes to  human-rights issues.  That the IOC allowed the games to go on in China when over a million Uyghur Muslims are said to corralled in prison camps and forced to perform slave labor is an abomination.

But I have the answer! In the future, let’s not limit that games to one country. Let’s spread the competitions worldwide. That way, no country has to foot the ridiculously bloated bill attached to hosting the competitions. And let’s use existing facilities, so we don’t end up with abandoned places like the Hellinikon Baseball Stadium in Athens—which is currently being used to house refugees—and all those deserted venues in Sochi, Russia. Spreading the locations around the world would limit local costs and congestion. And, though the TV networks might complain, with modern technology the Games could be covered and broadcast from pretty much anywhere.

I really believe you can make these fixes, so we fans can continue being thrilled by the phenomenal athletes you bring into our living rooms every two years. But please make the changes quickly, because if you don’t, that Olympic dream may soon be nothing but a long-lost memory.

Sincerely,

Anne Montgomery

The past and present collide when a tenacious reporter seeks information on an eleventh century magician…and uncovers more than she bargained for.

WOLF CATCHER

Anne Montgomery

Historical Fiction/Suspense

TouchPoint Press

February 2, 2022

In 1939, archeologists uncovered a tomb at the Northern Arizona site called Ridge Ruin. The man, bedecked in fine turquoise jewelry and intricate bead work, was surrounded by wooden swords with handles carved into animal hooves and human hands. The Hopi workers stepped back from the grave, knowing what the Moochiwimi sticks meant. This man, buried nine hundred years earlier, was a magician.

Former television journalist Kate Butler hangs on to her investigative reporting career by writing freelance magazine articles. Her research on The Magician shows he bore some European facial characteristics and physical qualities that made him different from the people who buried him. Her quest to discover The Magician’s origin carries her back to a time when the high desert world was shattered by the birth of a volcano and into the present-day dangers of archeological looting where black market sales of antiquities can lead to murder.

REVIEW COPIES OF WOLF CATCHER AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

Review/interview requests: media@touchpointpress.com

Get your copy where you buy books.

I hate milk. Which I blame on my mom.

When I was a kid, we had a silver box at the back door where a uniformed man in a jaunty cap deposited four glass bottles of milk on a regular basis. (Yes, youngsters, that was a thing.) Now, I never minded that milk. It was those dreaded days when Mom would crack open the fridge and discover we were out of milk that caused my aversion to the stuff.

My brother, sister, and I would stare at the dry cereal in our bowls and ready ourselves to run, because we knew what was coming. Powdered milk. Ugh! My mom would mix it with water and, as we all complained, she’d grit her teeth and yell, “In the Depression sometimes all we had was powdered milk!” Then she’d dump the stuff in our bowls.

Now, if you never had the pleasure of old-fashioned powdered milk, note that it was rather thin and blue. Not sure how that’s chemically possible, but that’s what I remember. And it was awful. So, I got out of the habit of drinking milk. I rationalized that my love of cheese and ice cream surely filled my bones with the appropriate amount of calcium, but recently I’ve begun to think I may have missed the milk boat.

“I’ve never broken a bone,” my 96-year-old mom says to me periodically. “That’s because I drink my milk.” Then she waits for my response, which makes me calculate the number of times I’ve broken bones: my wrist twice, my elbow, my right fibula, a vertebrae, and recently my ankle where I suffered both a broken fibula and tibia.

“You don’t drink milk,” she’ll say. “That’s why you’ve hurt yourself.”

“You ruined it for me when you made me drink that blue stuff,” I counter. “And I was involved in sports, so most of my broken bones are explainable.”

“I love warm milk!” she says sounding like she’s fanaticizing about a bottle of fine Champaign. The whole idea makes me gag.

But I will admit that milk can be useful, something I learned from that party-animal Genghis Khan and his fun bunch of pony-riding warriors who terrorized the locals and created the massive Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century. He and his men faced a Chinese army that outnumbered them 10-to-1. And they beat them thanks to…milk. Really. It seems that Genghis and the boys had a gene that made them able to digest milk. The Chinese soldiers did not. So, the Mongols never needed to carry much food. They just milked their horses, slurped it up, hoped on, and conquered much of Asia and Eastern Europe in a relative flash.

Some of us can thank good old Genghis and his men for spreading that milk-digesting gene around. Genghis himself was said to have six wives and over 500 concubines, so there was an awful lot of gene-sharing going on. It’s said that 16 million men today–scientists have tracked his Y-chromosome–are genetic decedents of the emperor himself. Here in the US, 90% of adults can drink milk without issue, no doubt thanks to our milk-digesting ancestors, while in the rest of the world, 75% of adults are lactose intolerant. If Genghis were alive today, we’d owe him a big thank-you card for all that cheese and ice cream and, yes, milk, that we consume with regularity.

Knowing that, I can’t say I like milk any more than I did. But I can see milk has some pretty magical powers. After all, milk forged an empire that covered about nine million square miles of land and, at its peak, ruled over 110 million people, which was about 1-in-4 individuals living at the time. So, go ahead and grab a glass of milk. I’ll join you after I dig in the freezer for some ice cream.

The past and present collide when a tenacious reporter seeks information on an eleventh century magician…and uncovers more than she bargained for.

WOLF CATCHER

Anne Montgomery

Historical Fiction/Suspense

TouchPoint Press

February 2, 2022

In 1939, archeologists uncovered a tomb at the Northern Arizona site called Ridge Ruin. The man, bedecked in fine turquoise jewelry and intricate bead work, was surrounded by wooden swords with handles carved into animal hooves and human hands. The Hopi workers stepped back from the grave, knowing what the Moochiwimi sticks meant. This man, buried nine hundred years earlier, was a magician.

Former television journalist Kate Butler hangs on to her investigative reporting career by writing freelance magazine articles. Her research on The Magician shows he bore some European facial characteristics and physical qualities that made him different from the people who buried him. Her quest to discover The Magician’s origin carries her back to a time when the high desert world was shattered by the birth of a volcano and into the present-day dangers of archeological looting where black market sales of antiquities can lead to murder.

REVIEW COPIES OF WOLF CATCHER AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

Contact: Chelsea Pieper, Publicity Manager, Media Liaison

Review/interview requests: media@touchpointpress.com

Pre-orders available here.

I’m delighted to share this 5-Star review of my novel Wolf Catcher.

“The story is very well-paced, reaching a page-turning, action-packed climax to the end. This story has all the elements of a great suspense drama centered around a historical mystery.” Heidi Slowinski

Find the rest of the review here.

WOLF CATCHER

The past and present collide when a tenacious reporter seeks information on an eleventh century magician…and uncovers more than she bargained for.

Anne Montgomery

Historical Fiction/Suspense

In 1939, archeologists uncovered a tomb at the Northern Arizona site called Ridge Ruin. The man, bedecked in fine turquoise jewelry and intricate bead work, was surrounded by wooden swords with handles carved into animal hooves and human hands. The Hopi workers stepped back from the grave, knowing what the Moochiwimi sticks meant. This man, buried nine hundred years earlier, was a magician.

Former television journalist Kate Butler hangs on to her investigative reporting career by writing freelance magazine articles. Her research on The Magician shows he bore some European facial characteristics and physical qualities that made him different from the people who buried him. Her quest to discover The Magician’s origin carries her back to a time when the high desert world was shattered by the birth of a volcano and into the present-day dangers of archeological looting where black market sales of antiquities can lead to murder.

REVIEW COPIES OF WOLF CATCHER AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

Contact: Jennifer Bond, Publicity Manager, Media Liaison

Review/interview requests: media@touchpointpress.com

Get your copy where you buy books.

While researching my historical-fiction novel Wolf Catcher, I found myself immersed in volcanoes. The reason? The Sunset Crater Volcano. Today the vast cinder cone that rests outside of Flagstaff, Arizona is a National Monument.

A cinder cone volcano is one of several types all of which form differently. In the case of the Sunset Crater Volcano, scientists believe it began erupting about 900 years ago. Had we been on hand for the big event, we would have noticed the ground shaking on and off in the weeks leading up to the eruption. Then the earth would have split open, emitting steam, and fire, and a cloud of ash that rose five miles into sky. As lightning zigged and zagged above the high desert, ash rained down on 800-square miles of land. After several weeks, or months, the cone grew to about 1,000 feet high, a loosely-packed amalgam of volcanic ash and reddish basalt cinders.

While today we understand the geological forces that birth a volcano, ancient people could only guess about what was happening beneath the earth. Luckily, The Sunset Crater Volcano has a modern-day sister who gave us a look into how witnesses might have assessed the eruption.

Paricutín is a cinder cone volcano just like the one at Sunset Crater. But this volcano, near the west coast of Mexico in the southern half of the country, erupted on and off between 1943 and 1952, in full view of the terrified inhabitants of the area. These documented reactions helped scientists studying the Sunset Crater Volcano discern how the Native Americans who peopled the high plateau may have reacted upon witnessing the event.

Here I will let some of the characters from Wolf Catcher explain.

“They were the same kind of volcanoes, right?” Cooper asked.

Marty nodded. “They are both cinder cones and they both gave the people ample warning that something was happening. No one in Paricutín died as a direct result of the eruption, and from what they’ve discovered so far, probably no one died here either. But let’s backtrack a little. It’s easy to know what happened at Paricutín. We have eyewitnesses. We know exactly when the eruption occurred. But at Sunset Crater, for a long time, there was no foolproof way to determine when the big event happened.”

“Is there now?” Kate asked.

“Well, that depends on who you talk to. I can tell you this. Before a Sinagua pithouse was discovered buried in the cinders, scientists had no idea the volcano was so young. They were able to date the pithouse using tree-rings and the pottery they found, and concluded that the eruption happened sometime in the late eleventh century. The ash from Sunset Crater fell over an area of nearly eight hundred square miles. In some places, just an inch, in others, it was fifteen feet deep. Just to give you a good idea of what that means, four inches of ash, especially if it’s wet, is enough to collapse a modern-day roof.”

“So, if you were caught up in the ash fall you were dead?” Cooper said.

“Theoretically, but as I explained, we haven’t found any bodies. And if we use the Paricutín model, we assume the people escaped in time. What we also know is that in Mexico the people were sure there was an angry god under the ground. In fact, they erected a row of big white Christian crosses in front of the lava flow to protect their villages from the creature.”

“Did it help?” Kate smiled.

Marty laughed. “I’m afraid the crosses did no good at all. Five villages were damaged, some destroyed, by the lava and ash.“

It’s not much of a stretch to assume that the ancestors of the Hopi who occupied the area around Sunset Carter Volcano may have, like the people at Paricutín, believed angry gods were at work, and that some appeasement was in order.

What we do know is that the ash fall proved a benefit to those villages situated in just the right places, locations that received a few inches of ash, enough to fortify the soil and grow crops, while others lost their homes completely when many feet of ash destroyed the productivity of their land. Those forced from their homes might have fought desperately with those who benefitted from the eruption in order to survive.

Then there were those who were lured to the area in search of religious understanding. Who was the god? Why was he angry? What could the people do to pacify him? The Sunset Carter Volcano might have become a place of sacred pilgrimage.

It is into this fractured landscape that the man I call Wolf Catcher arrived.

The past and present collide when a tenacious reporter seeks information on an eleventh century magician…and uncovers more than she bargained for.

WOLF CATCHER

Anne Montgomery

Historical Fiction/Suspense

TouchPoint Press

February 2, 2022

In 1939, archeologists uncovered a tomb at the Northern Arizona site called Ridge Ruin. The man, bedecked in fine turquoise jewelry and intricate bead work, was surrounded by wooden swords with handles carved into animal hooves and human hands. The Hopi workers stepped back from the grave, knowing what the Moochiwimi sticks meant. This man, buried nine hundred years earlier, was a magician.

Former television journalist Kate Butler hangs on to her investigative reporting career by writing freelance magazine articles. Her research on The Magician shows he bore some European facial characteristics and physical qualities that made him different from the people who buried him. Her quest to discover The Magician’s origin carries her back to a time when the high desert world was shattered by the birth of a volcano and into the present-day dangers of archeological looting where black market sales of antiquities can lead to murder.

REVIEW COPIES OF WOLF CATCHER AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

Contact: Jennifer Bond, Publicity Manager, Media Liaison

Review/interview requests: media@touchpointpress.com

Get your copy where you buy books.

My historical fiction novel Wolf Catcher, which is partially based on a true story, has been released by TouchPoint Press.

Wolf Catcher follows the lives of Kate and Kaya who are separated by nine centuries. Both feel rejected by the societies in which they live, until they are bound together by one man. The Magician, as he came to be called, was discovered in 1939 when archeologists uncovered a tomb at a remote Northern Arizona site called Ridge Ruin. The man, bedecked in fine turquoise jewelry and intricate beadwork, was surrounded by myriad pots, arrow points, shells, and fine mineral specimens. But it was the wooden swords with handles carved into animal hooves and human hands that the Hopi workers explained identified him as a magician.

But who was he and why did he look different from those who buried him? In my former role as a journalist, I was tasked with determining why this man was interred so reverently and with such incredible wealth. Many of the situations that fictional reporter Kate Butler faces in the story actually happened. My research carried me back to a time when the high desert world was shattered by the birth of a volcano, then forward into the present-day dangers of archeological looting and the black market sales of antiquities.

Get your copy today!

REVIEW COPIES OF Wolf Catcher AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

Contact: Jennifer Bond, Publicity Manager/Media Liaison

Review/interview requests: media@touchpointpress.com

Register & Order Online: TouchPointPress.com/Bookstore
or get your copy here.

Also available from Ingram and other major retailers.