I was born in Phoenix when it was still just a swamp-cooled cow-town, a past unrecognizable in the sprawling metropolitan area that exists today, but my roots here go quite a bit farther back. During the Great Depression, Grandma brought Dad and his two sisters from Kansas out to live with my great aunt in Yuma, Arizona. My great-aunt had come out west with the railroad as a Harvey Girl. As a ‘Harvey Girl,’ she joined other young, unmarried women recruited by the railroad to serve as waitresses on routes serving the western frontier, and she put down roots in Yuma to run a boarding house. The story is she went blind hanging up all those white sheets in the glaring desert sun.

Grandma eventually moved from there to Tucson where one of my aunts attended the University of Arizona; my other aunt and my father went to Arizona State University in Tempe, the university where I would later earn my MFA and go on to teach at. Dad had gone back to Tucson after his discharge from the Army at the end of WWII, then moved to Phoenix in the late ‘40’s to take a job as an accountant at the Farmers’ Co-op. My mom had moved from Cleveland to Phoenix around the same time to  live with a friend. 

Mom & Dad married and started their family. After a couple of tragic losses, my brother was born, then me, then seven years and nine years later, my younger sister and brother came along. Camping in the Arizona wilderness was one of their favorite things to do when I was young,  trips I don’t remember well except that they made the beautiful, diverse landscapes of Arizona, from the Sonoran desert with its majestic, many-armed saguaro cacti to the snow-covered White Mountains, central to who I am.

They bought our cabin up near Payson, Arizona when I was only five. The East Verde River runs along the back of the rows of cabins, and to this day, it is my own little piece of Arizona with its ever-changing river, the wind in its conifer trees, cracks of monsoon lightning right overhead, the Great Blue Heron’s vast wingspan.

I first said the words, “I love you” to my future husband there. He’s an Iowa native, a teenage Arizona transplant, who loves to travel, and for many years we camped among and explored the many historic ruins of the Four Corners region. We learned a lot about Arizona’s many different Indigenous tribes and cultures together, and we continue to travel and learn. As a novelist, I’m inspired by the variety of Arizona, by the land, and by the peoples who have treasured it. I wish to share that variety through my work—my love letter to the cultures and landscapes that make up the state that shaped me and my characters. 

Each book  in The Arizona Series begins with an introduction to the Indigenous peoples whose homelands are   focal points  of the novel. All of the books are  woven, usually in an alternating pattern of four chapters with different points of view, alternating time periods, and  Native American culture stories. These stories—and the landscapes of this state that inspired them—are among Arizona’s treasures. I feel lucky to be able to explore them alongside my novel’s beloved, flawed, handsome Arizonan cowboy and hero, Guy Thornton.

From my heart to your imaginations,

Jan Kelly