For the longest time, I wanted to get my story published outside of Utah. My Master Plan worked when my story about an amusement park in Fort Collins, Colorado, was accepted for an anthology by the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, a non-profit in Denver. The call went out last year, encouraging writers to submit stories based on real people or events from Colorado. For years, while visiting Fort Collins, I took my grandchildren to Swetsville Zoo, where scrap-metal monsters lived their rusty lives. The facility closed in 2023, and the land was sold. But in the name of those sweet family memories, I brought the monsters back to life and placed them in a story, “The Grand Escape of Swetsville Zoo.”
The anthology’s release party is scheduled for September 15, 2026, in Aurora, CO, at Haven Books and Coffee, from 4 PM to 6 PM.