Author: Karen GoatKeeper

Karen GoatKeeper loves to write. Her books include picture books, novels and nonfiction for science activity books and nature books. A recent inclusion are science teaching units.
The coming year has goals for two new novels, a picture book and some books of personal essays. This is ambitious and ignores time constraints.
She lives in the Missouri Ozarks with her small herd of Nubian dairy goats. The Ozarks provides the inspiration and setting for most of her books.

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GKP Writing News

Writing “Old Promises”

When I wrote “Broken Promises”, I intended to move Hazel Whitmore from the city to the country. It took an entire book to accomplish this. So I ended up writing “Old Promises”.

cover of "Old Promises" Hazel Whitmore #2 by Karen GoatKeeper
It took all of “Broken Promises” to get Hazel Whitmore out of the city. Now she is in the country, rural Missouri, trying to adapt to no internet, no cell phone, new relatives, new school and being miles from town.

The Setting

Although I’ve seen every contiguous state and lived in several of them, I’ve lived in the rural Missouri Ozarks for thirty years. Following the dictum ‘write what you know’, I moved Hazel to the Missouri Ozarks. This covers a lot of territory.

Crooked Creek is a fictitious town modeled on two or three towns I’ve lived near. The residents are drawn from people I’ve known in these towns, although only one is true to the person.

The land Hazel moves to is modeled after a place we looked at when we moved here. It wasn’t suitable for our life style, but works well for Hazel’s.

My imagination dreamed up the house. I’ve been in buildings filled with dust and dirt along with cobwebs. These were a bit exaggerated for the novel.

The setting was essential for writing “Old Promises”, even needing a bit of a map.

City to Country

There are so many adjustments for someone moving from the city, if they want to be part of the country life for real. Some of them are a big shock.

For me, seeing the horizon was amazing as smog hid it near Los Angeles. And my father’s place was flooded in three days after I got there, something I’d only seen on TV.

Hazel’s world is a bit different. Her new house is hidden behind a hill so there is no cell service. Internet service is slow once her mother can afford to have it put in. Town is miles away.

Hazel’s school is a small kindergarten to eighth grade. The students have known each other all their lives. She is not only new, but a stranger, a foreigner and resented by relatives she has never met or known of before.

Sink or Swim

Although the plot revolves around an old family feud, the real story is Hazel trying to understand and adjust to a way of life undreamed of by those living in cities. In some ways, that way of life will never be understood by the city transplant. That is something I understand even after thirty years living in the Ozarks and helped me in writing “Old Promises”.

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Latest From High Reaches

Us and Them Attitudes

I just finished reading a book, “The First Ladies” an historical fiction by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray which I highly recommend. Although the book is about the friendship of Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune, it reminded me of an us and them incident with my goats.

Stay Away!

I was still relatively new with goats at the time. In starting a 4-H goat project, I met two families with goat dairies. And all my does went dry one winter. So I borrowed a Saanen doe from one of the dairies.

My Nubians are brown and black. They have long, pendulous ears. There was one black Alpine doe with upright ears.

Nubian goat us and them attitude
This is my Nubian herd a couple of years ago. It doesn’t change much from year to year, only loses members. It does reflect what my herd has looked like all along: brown and black. A goat of another color is ostracized.

Saanens are white. They have upright ears. The breed is known for being easy going.

Usually, when a new goat is introduced into a herd, everyone gangs up on the poor thing. She is impressed with the news she is at the bottom of the pecking order. Unless she is very aggressive, she stays there for a long time.

That poor Saanen was ignored. If she walked over to my Nubians, they walked away. Not a single one would have anything to do with her.

My Nubians would lie down basking in the sun, an activity Nubians adore doing. When the Saanen laid down at the edge of the group, they got up and moved.

This us and them attitude held for the several months the Saanen was with us. It had to be such an attitude as the Saanen was a dairy goat like them, ate the same food, was treated the same.

Human Us and Them

In “The First Ladies” the same kind of attitude was most apparent. Government officials, military personnel, the public all saw only that Mrs. Bethune was black. Even when she had a personal invitation from Mrs. Roosevelt, she would be turned away or threatened only on the basis of her color.

Such attitudes were the norm at that time. Sometimes it seems some people think they are the norm now. Us and them. They are different.

Another aspect of the book was most interesting. That was the interplay of perceptions. These women forged a deep friendship and working relationship. Yet, they first had to bridge a culture gap. This is where the different chapters from the viewpoints of the two brought out the us and them attitudes, the assumptions we hold about each other.

This is true not just in the case of race, but also for gender, economic class, about everything we absorb as we grow up. It’s easy to drift along holding on to these attitudes. We are better people, more true to the beliefs we claim to hold, if we challenge these and recognize how easy and sometimes harmful an us and them attitude can be.

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GKP Writing News

Breaking New Ground

There are times when writing what you know about just isn’t enough. When that happens, an author is left breaking new ground.

Unfortunately, research is never as good as experience. That lack of experience often shows up to anyone who has that experience.

Being Outdated

I grew up near Los Angeles learning to drive on the freeways and across the city. Yet, I would not try to write about the modern experience because what I remember is not what exists now.

That came home to me the last time I visited people and places in my home town. I had only been gone ten years, yet I almost needed a map to find the old neighborhood. The houses were still there, some remodeled, but the people weren’t. It was not home.

The same problem is coming up in Life’s Rules. Part of the action is based on things I remember from long ago. Except those things have changed a lot. That leaves me breaking new ground as I reach out to people to see how my memories and the new realities mesh.

cover of "For Love of Goats" by Karen GoatKeeper
These are Nubian dairy goats. They have long legs, Roman noses and long, pendulous ears. Boers have long ears too, but not the same and they are shorter and stouter. Other dairy goat breeds have upright ears or, in the case of LaManchas, very short ears. Their body shapes differ as well. Someone unfamiliar with goats will not know these differences and will probably not find them by doing research.

Research Isn’t Enough

When I was working on “For Love of Goats”, I knew every story needed an illustration. I also knew finding an illustrator was not going to be easy, not because there aren’t lots of good illustrators out there, but because few of those illustrators knew about goats.

Serious goat owners usually cringe at the “Billy Goats Gruff” caricatures. This is what many people think goats are like. They aren’t.

There are hundreds of goat breeds around the world as I found out doing research for “Goat Games”. Every breed is different both in looks and personality. So I did my own illustrations to make sure Alpines and Saanens have the correct ears, Nigerian Dwarfs have the correct stature. Nubians look friendly and beautiful (Yes, I’m biased.)

Don’t think this breaking new ground research doesn’t affect writing. We read a big name coffee table book on John Deere tractors. The author had obviously never owned or driven such a tractor.

We are very familiar with the local milkweeds. Some of the books we’ve read about them have obvious errors in them due to the authors knowing only what they looked up.

cover for "Goat Games" by Karen GoatKeeper
I visited many goat owners as I wrote this book. In talking with them, I found out a lot about how different breeds differ which is why an owner prefers one breed over another.

Breaking New Ground

There are many times experience isn’t enough. But research can only take an author wo far. Not realizing its limitations can really hurt a manuscript.

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Latest From High Reaches

Goat Birth Defects

Goat kids are special. They are cute and soon provide hours of fun watching their various escapades. Waiting for them to be born doesn’t include thinking about goat birth defects.

Like people, goats grow old. High Reaches Juliette is old. She got bred by accident – she wasn’t supposed to be in season, her daughter was, but she wasn’t as out of season as I thought – and I watched with a mix of anticipation and dread. The dread won.

Goat Birth Defects

Yes, livestock can have babies born with birth defects. Juliette’s single kid was born with several. Why? I will never know.

In a way, I think Juliette knew. Most new mothers talk to their kids. She says nothing. She doesn’t look for her kid.

The kid was born dead. There was nothing to be done for it, if it was alive.

being small is not goat birth defect
Goats usually have twins. Sometimes one kid is a glutton and gets big while the other is born small. This little Nubian buck kid was one of the small ones. He was too small to nurse and had trouble standing up. That meant he was a bottle baby and had to be fed often. So, he went to work with me.

Disappointment

Yes, I am disappointed. The strain of wondering if the kid would be born during the recent cold made sleeping hard. I was glad the kid waited.

When Juliette showed all the signs of imminent kidding, I was excited. The prospect of new kids brightened my day.

Now there is a different disappointment. Goat birth defects have been rare in my herd, only a handful over almost fifty years. Each is a loss and felt as a loss.

Nubian goat wether
The little Nubian buck kid grew up. Sometimes the small kids have internal problems and they don’t survive. Pest didn’t. Yes, his name is Pest. He is now a wether weighing around 200 pounds and spoiled.

Living With Disappointment

Goat birth defects are disappointing. Such kids are usually born dead or must be destroyed as they will not survive.

Louie, a blind kid, was an exception. He learned to get around quite well and lived several years before falling victim to illness.

Losing livestock is part of life for owners. It’s always disappointing and demands reflection as to what happened, why and changes to prevent it in the future. Unfortunately, this loss for me has no obvious cause or prevention.

Looking Forward

Four does are due to kid in March. All are younger.

Like Juliette, I will put this behind me. March kids will be here in two months.

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GKP Writing News

Write What They Know

I’m a city girl moved to the country. Anne of Green Gables is a favorite series. Perhaps that is one reason this type of plot interested me. After all, writers are encouraged to write what they know.

That’s a good idea as far as it goes. Few of us have led such adventurous lives to really live up to this. In fact, although I grew up outside Los Angeles, “Broken Promises” is set in New York City, a place I have visited twice.

Gaining Experiences

My depictions of New York City are limited in the novel because I did want to follow the write what they know admonition. My last visit to the Big Apple was a two week stay. During that time I explored Central Park, a way to stay sane surrounded by so many buildings and people. Times Square, Broadway, Coney Island, Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History got stuffed into that two weeks.

At the time, my novel was not even an idea. Writing was not on my agenda. I was on vacation, the first one I’d had in many years. Although I was not aware of it, I was storing up all those memories so I could draw on them years later.

cover for "Broken Promises" by Karen GoatKeeper
One advantage of being older is having a big storehouse of memories to draw on when I am writing. An important attitude is seeing every task, person, place and happening, no matter how mundane or boring, as a learning experience.

Mining Memories

Many writers keep journals. I don’t. I have pictures and each picture tells me a story of a place, a time, a reaction.

Every place I go, every job I hold, every person I meet is a chance to learn something new. As I write, my memory reminds me of similar places and people from my past.

Different experiences bring back emotions as well as situations. Hazel loses her father in the novel. My family lost my nephew. My father had died leaving behind a letter, a letter from the dead.

It’s possible to look places up, even take virtual tours now. People write about lots of things on the internet, even as I am doing now. But these are second hand.

Write What They Know.

To truly write about something, it helps to have actually seen and felt it in reality. At least experience something similar. That’s when words stop being just words and create a fictional reality.

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Latest From High Reaches

Spring Gardening

It’s amazing how uplifting sun and temperatures above freezing can be after days of near and below zero. The goats and chickens tumble out their doors to bask in the sun. Thoughts turn to kids and spring gardening.

Waiting on Kids

My Nubian doe High Reaches Juliette was due about New Year’s. The days passed and she stayed fat and showing signs, but no kids.

When she looked like any time, the temperatures plunged. Anxiety began as wet kids stand no chance in zero degrees even with an experienced mother goat.

The cold seemed to stop all kid preparation. As this cold moves on, the wait begins anew.

Reading Gardening Books

There’s not much to do outside with cold temperatures and a dusting of snow. Reading about gardening, seed sorting and starting along with spring gardening plans pass the days.

Much of the country is having much worse weather than the Ozarks. That’s one of the reasons we moved here thirty years ago. Waist deep snow along with temperatures ten and twenty below for six months didn’t fit our preferred life style.

My current gardening book “The Country Journal Book of Vegetable Gardening” written by Nancy Bubel is set in Pennsylvania. Some of the crops, all of the timing and some of the problems don’t apply here in the Ozarks. So, why is the book helpful?

Zephyr summer squash
This is definitely on my garden list for this year. Zephyr summer squash is easy to grow, delicious to eat and somewhat tolerant of squash bugs.

Universal Gardening Ideas

Some things fit gardening no matter where the garden is. The author prefers setting out rows. I have marked out beds. But planting seeds is the same.

Pennsylvania gardens are set out later than mine. But spring gardening planning entails the same details for succession planting, mulching, cultivating, seed starting and more.

Much of this and other gardening books won’t apply to the Ozarks. Enough of it does to make reading them worthwhile.

Besides, its relaxing to read about spring gardening while waiting for the season to begin. Now is when the planned garden is beautiful and productive. Before reality sets in.

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Latest From High Reaches

Winter Snow

This winter’s weather has been weird. That includes the first winter snow storm.

Past Snows

I’ve lived up in snow country, the Michigan Upper Peninsula, where snow lies waist deep for months. It’s beautiful and cold. Even the moisture in the air turns to tiny ice crystals sparkling like diamonds in the sunlight.

These were dry snows that fell when the temperatures were far below freezing. Many would pour from hand to ground like sugar pours from the bag.

Ozark Snows

Ozark winters rarely get that intense cold. Winter snow often falls when the temperature is thrity degrees. It’s a wet, cement snow great for snowballs and snowmen and deadly to shovel.

These snows rarely lasted more than a day or two before the temperatures rose, the sun came out and everything melted. Children may regret this. I don’t as doing chores in the snow is drudgery.

Ozark creek in winter snow
Over an inch of moisture fell, but only a half inch of very wet snow sat on the land until the sun touched it. Soon only patches sitting in the shade were left. The melt raised the Ozark creek a bit.

This Winter

It was raining as the thermometer stood at thirty-six degrees. This is too warm for snow or freezing rain.

Then the drops turned white. Clumps of snow flakes fell only to melt as soon as they hit the ground. This winter snow was falling when it was too warm to snow.

The snow was persistent and left a half inch of slush on the ground. Luckily the clouds were too thick and held the temperature above freezing all night. I’m not good at ice skating and too old to bounce well when I fall down.

crows in winter snow
Over the winter groups of crows march around the pastures. They are wary birds, taking off at any disturbance. They call back and forth. They didn’t seem very happy with the white stuff.

What Happened?

The cold air bringing the snow didn’t shove the warm air on the ground away. That left the clouds cold enough to snow which they did.

The layer of warm air along the ground wasn’t thick enough to melt the snow before it got to the ground. That meant our first winter snow fell when the temperature was too warm.

Winter isn’t done with us. The next cold front is much bigger, colder and meaner than the last one. We may get a real snow in the next few days.

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GKP Writing News

Writing That First Novel

Before I found National Novel Writing Month (NaN0), my books were more exercises in writing about goats and nature. Writing that first novel was not even an idea. Fiction was something I read, not wrote.

However, I’d finished “Goat Games” and “Exploring the Ozark Hills” and wanted a new writing project. I liked writing and wanted to do more of it.

False Starts

The NaNo challenge was to write 50,000 words in 3o days. That’s almost 2,000 words a day, a mind boggling number to me then. But I like challenges.

The problem was not having an idea for writing that first novel. Somehow I came up with one.

Disaster Looming

That plot idea was not workable. It was a disaster waiting for me to fall into it. I did just that.

There was no novel draft that November. However, I was hooked. That novel was left moldering on my computer as I came up with a new idea.

It was trite. City girl moves to the country. Done and done well so many times, the idea was a waste of time.

Marine Private First Class Brandon Smith

Everything changed with a phone call from my mother. My nephew, my brother’s only child, had been killed in Iraq.

Brandon was 19. He joined the Marines because he was looking for a way to get his life on track. His love was working on engines and he was supposed to do that. Except he was sent to Iraq.

Grief has so many forms. It’s different for every person. Perhaps that is why it shows up in so many novels.

cover for "Broken Promises" by Karen GoatKeeper
Hazel Whitmore is 12 when her world starts falling apart with the death of her father. Grief comes in many forms. Learning to live with it comes in many forms as well.

“Broken Promises”

My brother didn’t really accept Brandon’s death for a year. For my mother, it was devastating. He was the only grandchild she really had time with and he was killed on her eightieth birthday.

City girl moves to the country. Now Hazel had a reason to move. She had a conflict to resolve.

And I found writing that first novel that some novels write themselves even as they tear you apart inside.

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Latest From High Reaches

Buttercup Parade

One task for mid winter is to sort through and back up the plant pictures taken over the year. There weren’t a lot of them last year for many reasons. Still, I’ve come across a buttercup parade.

What is a buttercup parade? After all, a buttercup is a buttercup. Except there are several of them that grow around the place.

Early buttercups lead the buttercup parade
I found a number of these small buttercups growing along my Ozark road. These plants are hairy, leaves, stems and under the sepals. The petals are long and separate.

Wildflower Series

There are a number of wildflower parades around the area. One is the purple ironweed. For people driving by, these are only tall plants topped with purple flower heads.

When I go walking out to the fields where the ironweeds bloom, there is a succession of different ones. Usually the Arkansas blooms first followed by the Purple. Then the tall ironweed takes over arging with the Western. Last is the Missouri. All this runs from July to September.

Another series is the various white snakeroot, wild quiine, common boneset and false boneset. Summer is taken up by the yellow sunflowers. And the blue and purple asters run their series in the late summer into fall.

Dent County Flora

These series don’t matter to most people. Those few who drive by looking at the wildflowers see only the colors.

The series do make a difference to me as I keep nibbling away at the list of plants growing in Dent County. I must first notice the plants are different. Then I take a series of pictures on each plant and flower, marking them so I can come back to get pictures of the seeds or fruits.

Hardest of all is poring over the plant identification books trying to identify each of the plants. This brings me back to the buttercup parade.

buttercup parade in the garden
Bulbous buttercups showed up in my garden one year. They are pretty, bloom a long time and so they stayed. As with other garden wildflowers, they seed prolifically. I now pick out one or two to grow into their lovely mounds and pull the rest.

Which Is Which?

As far as I know now, there are four buttercups growing around me. They are the Early, Harvey’s, Hispid and Bulbous. I have pictures of all four. Now I get to double check the identifications in “Flora of Missouri” and www.missouriplants.com and put them into the Dent County Reds (Yellows and Orange) book.

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Looking At Lichens

Wildflower season will begin in a couple of months. I have a new camera to practice with to get ready. So I am out looking at lichens.

What Is a Lichen?

These are a textbook example of symbiosis, mutualism, a partnership between two organisms. Both of the participants benefit.

In the case of lichens, a fungus and an alga are the participants. The fungus provides the structure and nutrients. The alga provides food as it can do photosynthesis. A fungus can’t.

Orange lichen on a honey locust trunk
Most lichens in my area of the Ozarks are gray green in color. But they come in many colors. Orange is bright. It seems to only grow on tree trunks.

Where Are Lichens?

Around my home, lichens are lots of places. They grow on the trees. Some ground and rock areas are covered. Even my clothesline and truck have lichens growing on them.

These plantlike growths come in a variety of shapes and colors. Some look like flat leaves and are called folious. Others are spiky. The many branches of some make it look lacy.

Most lichens I see are a grayish green. There are places where they appear black. The ones on a black walnut near my barn are orange.

Up on a hill I found the soldier lichen. All lichens make a kind of pod that opens to release spores into the air to form new lichens elsewhere. Soldier lichens have bright red pods and got their name as the color was like that of British soldiers.

Wooly lichens spotted while looking for lichens
Lichens are not parasitic. They hold onto a surface and grow there. These wooly ones seem to prefer warmer weather when they can spread all over branches. Only a few were braving winter cold.

Why Bother With Lichens?

If you’ve ever admired Spanish moss, you’ve admired a lichen. Such lichens grow where the air is moist like in the South.

Up on the tundra, reindeer and caribou graze on lichens as grass has trouble growing in such a cold place. Cold, even freezing, doesn’t seem to bother lichens much as long as they have water, nutrients and sunlight.

Looking at lichens often means seeing folious lichen
Folious lichen looks a bit like smashed gray green leaves on rocks and tree trunks. These are often in a circular pattern. They put up cups that produce the spores to drift away on the wind to begin new colonies.

Lichens aren’t Wildflowers

My Dent County Flora is about plants. Lichens aren’t plants. But they are interesting.

And looking at lichens, taking some pictures of them, let’s me get in some good camera practice. Plus they are interesting. Any excuse is a good one to go out walking in the woods.