I was the seventh child born into a farming family in Britton, South Dakota, and in a strange way, that made my childhood easier than it might have been. By the time I came along, my older brothers and sisters had the farm work covered. I was mostly left free to be a kid. I spent my days playing Crazy Eights and Old Maid at the kitchen table, climbing whatever tree looked climbable, and lying on the porch watching clouds move across that big South Dakota sky. I did not know it then, but I think that quiet, watchful kind of childhood planted something in me that took eight decades to grow into anything.
I married at nineteen. My husband and I built a life together for fifty two years, through everything a long marriage goes through, good years and hard ones, small daily routines and the bigger moments that change you. He passed away in 2017. That kind of loss reshapes a person. It took time before I understood that the reshaping was not only grief, it was also room opening up for something new.
Now I live in central Washington with my partner and our two doodle dogs. I have a married daughter, a grown grandson, and a teenage granddaughter, and being around them keeps me tied to the present even while so much of my life has already been lived. I never planned to write books. I did not study poetry. I did not spend my younger years dreaming about publishing. What I had instead was a long life full of ordinary and extraordinary things, and at some point I realized I wanted to put some of it into words.
My first collection, Miles of Smiles, came out of that realization. It is a short book, the kind of thing you can read a few pages of before bed, but every poem in it comes from something real, a memory, a feeling, a moment I wanted to hold onto a little longer by writing it down. After that came Miles of Wonder, which leans harder into the parts of life that are not easy, aging, loss, the trouble that comes with a long life, but still finds room for lightness in the middle of it. My third book, Miles of Giggles, is exactly what it sounds like. Sometimes you just need something that makes you smile.
People sometimes ask why I started so late. Honestly, I do not think of it as late. I think of it as right on time. I spent most of my life living it rather than writing about it, and I am not sure I could have written these poems any earlier, because I had not lived enough yet to have them in me. Being in my early eighties, most of my life has been lived in the past, but I am eager to see what comes next. I feel privileged to send these little gift poems out into the world and to have readers share and enjoy them.
If you want to read them, my books are available on Amazon, and you can find more about me and my writing at my website, kathleenmiles.com. I also keep a page on Goodreads and LibraryThing where readers have been kind enough to leave their thoughts.
Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Kathleen-Miles/author/B0G7CR6VXV
Website: https://kathleenmiles.com/
LibraryThing: https://www.librarything.com/a/6565382/Kathleen-Miles
I do not know how many more years of writing I have ahead of me, but I am determined to enjoy this new and wonderful adventure of authorship for as long as I am able. If my farm upbringing taught me anything, it is that you make the most of the time you are given, whether that is a summer afternoon on a porch or a whole new chapter that opens up at eighty.
