Guest column: Characters real and imaginary

Editor's note: Subbing for Norris Burkes this week is Davalynn Spencer. She is the author of the award-winning, inspirational Western series "The Cañon City Chronicles," 14 additional novels and one devotional book for women. Back when flip phones were on the cutting edge, I was a police reporter, photographer and religion-page editor for The Cañon City Daily Record newspaper in Colorado. Life was never boring. But I wanted to be a novelist. Writing feature stories assuaged my longing to push a more creative pen, and my newspaper's Back in Time section often had me mining treasures at the local history museum for all sorts of fascinating facts. Like the account of Utes in the 1860s who made off with a settler's child. Mom quickly retrieved her son, trading him for a pan of freshly baked biscuits. Another settler camping along the Arkansas River dropped his sidearm on a rock in his firepit and shot himself to death. Who needs fiction? Evidently, I did, because all those stories from the 1800s primed the pump of my author's heart. I began incubating the historical-fiction series, The Cañon City Chronicles. Gold was never found in Cañon City, but the fertile fields and orchards fed miners at Cripple Creek, Leadville and elsewhere. And the gold that mattered most trickled down mountain ravines in yellow aspen and shone in the character of hearty souls who peopled the town. Such background details made it into my first book in the series, "Loving the Horseman." So did the bit about the guy who shot himself. Over time, the fictional Hutton family developed against the backdrop of actual local events like the Royal Gorge Wars and the Bone Wars. One book mentions Old Mose, a famous rogue grizzly, and focuses on moving pictures, or flickers, filmed in the area in the early 1900s. Most of the characters in these books are people I've cooked up on my own. But others sneak up on me when I'm not looking, leaving me with the sense I've met them before and just can't remember when or where. One such character fits the latter category – a little cowboy named Kip. He's the youngest of three brothers, the tag-along. The one who gets left out more often than not. Recently, I realized where I'd met Kip, though that wasn't his real name. He was a student from my other life as a sixth-grade teacher – my Dandelion Cowboy. Each morning, he'd line up in front of my classroom with the rest of the first-period students. Except he wasn't much like the rest of the students. In his Wranglers and scuffed cowboy boots, he didn't dress like the others. A towhead among dark-haired children, he quietly stuck out in spite of how much he tried not to. But in the spring, when the dandelions sprouted, he was often at the front of the line with a short-stemmed bouquet and a shy smile. The little cowboy was a loner. A throwback, perhaps, from a long line of those who prefer the company of their horse and a good view of the herd. I didn't realize he was Kip until after the fact. After he'd become a favorite secondary character in books 4, 5 and 6 of my series. Today, when I see a patch of what most people call weeds, I wonder about my Dandelion Cowboy, if he stuck to his ways in spite of the crowd. I like to think he embodies a verse from the New Testament that says, "Obviously, I'm not trying to win the approval of people, but of God" (Galatians 1:10 NLT). And maybe there's a little bit of me in Grace Hutton, the main character from Book 6, when she says of her favorite nephew Kip, "That boy could smile the sun right out of the sky." Connect with Davalynn Spencer via her website at www.davalynnspencer.com. Contact Norris Burkes by voicemail at 843-608-9715 or email comment@thechaplain.net. Snail mail received at 10566 Combie Road, Suite 6643, Auburn, CA 95602.