Christine was born and raised in Minnesota outside a small town. Her father built their home on the banks of the Crow Wing river. She spent her childhood playing in the woods and river. She credits her mother with giving her a love of reading and thus writing.
When she started high school it was at St. Benedict’s a girl’s boarding school run by Benedictine nuns. She credits them with giving her a well-rounded education especially an appreciation for the arts. One of her English teachers was particularly encouraging. She edited the school paper learning more about the writing process and honing her skills.
After high school she went to nursing school and after graduation spent much of her working years in the operating room. Her experiences in health care inspire her fiction. She love poetry and has published works of many types.
She met her husband Gary in Mankato. After a short engagement they married. They have two children. They left Minnesota in 1969 and have lived in the southwest since. They lived in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and now are retired in Arizona.
Woman of the Heartland: Rural Upbringing
This book tells the stories of my mother’s life. It is fictionalized to make it more enjoyable. My mother, Doris McAllister grew up in rural North Central Minnesota and making a living was often a struggle for the family. In spite of a post war recession followed closely by the depression they survived. Doris was a lover of books and a wonderful storyteller much of the material in between the covers is based on the tales she told me and my seven siblings. Follow her life, her families many moves and even a trip across the country for her father to find work. You will relish the characters in her life: Tippy the intelligent and lively fox terrier, Elwin Doris’ paraplegic Uncle, Great-grandmother Arrowood who had a proverb for every occasion, her father, Alex who she dearly loved, Peter McAllister Alex’s father who married five times yet left his son to be raised by his in-laws, Squirt and Squeak her younger brother and sister. Through all the tough times these people had fun and loved. So take a trip back in time and see turkeys frozen in the trees, cottage cheese in a cheesecloth bag hanging from the clothes line, party lines, house dances, and the world that is a one room school house and what the teacher who has eight grades must accomplish from lessons to cleaning the floors.
Woman of the Heartland: The War Years
The second book of Woman of the Heartland this tells Doris’ story after she is engaged, WWII starts, she journeys to California to marry Tom, they are posted across the country at new Army-Air Corp bases, she had children, Tom is transferred to the infantry and sent to Germany. Her second child, a son Tommy, is born prematurely and becomes ill and dies at three months. When Tom returns home he builds their home and raise their family in it on the Crow Wing River.
Lost in the Nowhere
Christine’s first work of fiction. Is a Bangsian fantasy. that means it is set in whole or part in the afterlife.
Arthur Brooks has died and now finds himself caught in a place his friend John, also dead, calls the Nowhere.
He isn’t alone as well as John there is a ten-year-old boy and a young man a friend from college.
Now with the help of Emma Bloom a grief counselor whose paranormal powers allow her to see and
speak with the dead, and his spirit guide the Sojourner, Jerome. Arthur must discover how to escape from the Nowhere.
The Saga Of Lightning Bolt Bob
Lightning Bolt Bob’s story is a series of mishaps. A life that moves from one weird story in the news to another. Conceived on the fourth green of a golf course during a thunderstorm Bob’s life would always be affected by lightning.
As the book begins Bob is jumping from a small plane as it taxied down the runway in OKC. Bob is being transported from the local jail to a maximum-security prison. A tornado threatens and Bob takes his destiny into his own hands.
Destiny, most of it awful, has always played a part in Bob’s life. When he was three his father, Rodney, deserted Priscilla, his wife, and Bob. He left during a raging downpour, ostensibly to buy cigarettes. He never returned. Although Rodney and Priscilla didn’t have a great love affair, they had married because of her pregnancy. Priscilla sank into a deep depression. She too abandoned Bob when she never returned from her stay at a state mental institution. When Bob learned of her discharge he waited for her watching at the window of his grandmother’s squalid home. For three days, a violent storm pummeled the small house when the sky cleared Bob expected his mom to return, but she did not and no one knew her whereabouts.
Bob would spend the rest of his young years searching for his parents when he wasn’t incarcerated. Bob’s first foray into the penal system was at sixteen. He glued the front doors of his high school shut. However, a bottle of glue with his fingerprints was found at the scene. From then on Bob would be in and out of the prison system.
Bob got the handle Lightning Bolt when a fellow inmate found him enthralling and he became the wife of the biggest guy at Riverbend Max in Tennessee. A birthmark in the shape of a lightning bolt graced his backside. Big Earl saw it and christened him Lightning Bolt Bob. Other inmates covetous of his relationship with Earl cornered him in the shower one night and carved a lightning bolt tattoo on his forehead.
If you enjoy the books of Carl Hiaasen, Tom Robbins and Christopher Moore you will laugh at the events in this one too.
Life Flights: The Poetic Stylings of Christine Howard
Write On the Edge 