Nan C. Ballard settled in the green pastures of the Willamette Valley with her husband, horses, and four-pawed kids after three decades in the high deserts and mountains of the western US. Her technical writing and editing have included numerous environmental assessments, a county emergency operations plan, and a manual for county 9-1-1 coordinators in California. For a year, she wrote an arts column in The Modoc Independent monthly newspaper. Her poetry has been published in Willawaw Journal and the anthology Mount Shasta Reflections. Her short fiction A Tree on the Bluff won third place in the (very locally) prestigious Scott Valley, CA, Libraries Annual Writing Contest. She has written and collaborated on adaptations of several plays for community theater including a wild west Taming of the Shrew, a murder mystery for dinner theater, and an historical drama on the Modoc Indian War. She is co-chair of the Corvallis Chapter of Willamette Writers and belongs to a critique group that catches her when she strays off track. She collects daily precipitation data for the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow (CoCoRHS) project, grows a few vegetables and many weeds, crochets now and then, and posts infrequently at nancballardwriter.blogspot.com.
