Barbara A. Denz
Writer, Singer, and Ferret Rescuer
I found my passion for writing in an after-school daycare program when I was in kindergarten. With the encouragement of my mother and my teachers, my path led to an undergraduate degree in Literature at University of California, San Diego’s Muir College, with a specialty in Shakespearean and Medieval Literature.
My first payment for writing came in 1974, although the story was never published. Still. $300 for the first time out and with the editorial intention of keeping the story from ever being printed was … interesting. I submitted the story before the first issue ever hit the streets or I wouldn’t have bothered. The magazine was owned by Penthouse and the article was on tubal ligation. Always research your targeted publisher!
Since then, I’ve had several fantasy short stories published in anthologies edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Katharine Kerr/Martin Greenberg, and Deborah Grabien from the 1980s to 2012. Since I retired from the “real world” life as a Tech Writer/Editor, an unpublished book series has been eating up my spare time.
My first published submission was non-fiction in a cookbook in 1987. Back in the 1980s, Harrowsmith Magazine had a recipe contest. I submitted four recipes, of which two were taken for Volume 3 in the series. The three volumes were later published in The Complete Harrowsmith Cookbook in 1997.
Although raised on mysteries (especially Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and British and American comedy (P.G. Wodehouse, James Thurber, Ogden Nash), and “girl” favorites (Shakespeare, the Brontes, Victoria Holt, Mary Wallace), the science fiction and fantasy books crept in as soon as I got my own library card for my 8th birthday. First on the list was Robert Heinlein. From there, I just started to inhale books, generally reading all that the library had by any author. It was small wonder that when I settled on a genre to write, it would be Fantasy.
In the late 1980s, I became involved in my first online social network, GEnie, and got to know the writers as an Assistant SysOp in the Science Fiction/Fantasy Round Table (SFRT). Many contemporary writers in the US, Canada, and various European countries there are still friends and contacts on the “newer” internet-based Social Media. Gone are the days of the dial-up noises so many of us started with and now laugh at.
The other side of my retired life is as the singer I have been since I was five years old, although I’m much better at it now. I am an active member of the Vancouver Island folk music community, and of Folk Alliance, Region West (aka FAR West). As an aside, my last short story in print – in Deborah Grabien’s Tales From the House Band, Volume 2 – contains my story “The Ferrishyn Bargain,” which fleshes out the Manx story from a song by Canadian Juno Music Award nominee (and friend) Eileen McGann. Her original work is called “Song of the Ferrishyn” on her album Pocketful of Rhymes.
My husband, David, and I have performed music together in folk clubs, festivals, and regular folk sessions all over the world ever since we met. We have had several bands along the way – all with at least one CD/Digital CD. Our current active bands perform mostly in BC and Washington State. Port na Gael sees us making mostly Irish music with Vancouver-based friends (whom we met at the Boxwood traditional music “camp” in Nova Scotia). We also perform as a duo as Otter’s Holt (available on BandCamp), and as the Vancouver-Island-based band Bardavissa (Digital CD in the works), and occasionally with other musicians locally and around the world.
I’m ruled by ferrets, with an ever-changing total count after nearly fifty years of rescuing. For centuries, ferrets have been kept as rat- and rabbit-catchers. Their mannerisms and personalities feature prominently in what I sing and what I write.
