Here is the way Amazon.com summarizes Johnnie Come Lately, published by Camel Press on Feb. 1, 2015.
"Would life have been different for Johnnie if she'd been named after a woman rather than her dead uncle? Or if her mama hadn't been quite so beautiful or flighty? The grandparents who raised her were loving, but they didn't understand the turmoil roiling within her. And they had so many, many secrets.
"Why did her mama leave? Would she ever return? How did her Uncle Johnny really die? Who was her father? Now Johnnie Kitchen is a 43-year-old woman with three beautiful children, two of them grown. She has a handsome, hardworking husband who adores her, and they live in the historic North Texas town of Portion in a charming bungalow. But she never finished college and her only creative outlet is a journal of letters addressed to both the living and the dead.
"Although she has conquered the bulimia that almost killed her, Johnnie can never let down her guard, lest the old demons return. Or perhaps they never went away to begin with.
"For Johnnie has secrets of her own, and her worst fear is that the life she's always wanted--the one where she gets to pursue her own dreams--will never begin.
"Not until her ghosts reveal themselves."
After graduating from Clovis High School at 17, Ms. Rodgers attended ENMU from 1976-79 as a communications major.
"I used to joke that I was going to be Lois Lane, girl reporter, and I was going to have a Pulitzer Prize by 23," she said. "But, of course, I had no idea what all was involved in that career. Just because I'd won several writing awards in high school didn't mean I knew what I was doing once I got to Eastern."
After living one year on campus and working as a student writer for Mike Slinker in Information Services, she packed up her portable turquois manual typewriter and moved back home to Clovis. By then, she'd been battling the eating disorder bulimia. But she had to get a job.
After working as a maid for a day at Motel 6, she found the courage to finagle an interview with Bill Southard, managing editor of the Clovis News-Journal. Southard told her he didn't have any openings, but hired her anyway.
A week into writing headlines and obits, Mr. Southard assigned her first feature story.
"I was hooked on feature writing," Ms. Rodgers said, "but I still had to cover the ‘boring stuff' like school board and city council meetings."
Mr. Southard wrote western novels on the side under the pen name W.W. Southard, and had four novels published by Bantam Books before his untimely death from a brain tumor.
"His novel writing planted a seed in my brain: if a person from Clovis, New Mexico, could write fiction and get a book deal with a traditional publishing house, maybe I could, too," said Ms. Rodgers.
"Of course it would take years to make that happen. And I was always haunted by the fact that I'd ‘dropped out' of college."
After marrying a fighter pilot from Cannon Air Force Base, they moved to Tucson, Ariz., where she enrolled in Pima Community College. She attended a couple of semesters, but was still battling bulimia and once again found herself out of school.
Ms. Rodgers says some of her best memories from ENMU involved being a student writer in Information Services.
"Every time I approached that beautiful but imposing red brick Administration Building, I felt both terrified and exhilarated," said Ms. Rodgers. "The fear came from the thought I never knew what I was doing. The other student writers seemed to catch on faster, and I never wanted to stick out as the slow learner. But when Mike (Slinker) praised me for doing a good job on a story, my spirit soared. Someone believed in me."
Soon, her responsibilities also included taking photos and processing them in the darkroom, which came in handy when she worked for the Clovis News-Journal.
She also learned to write 30-second radio spots. She says having to pack so much information into such a limited word count also helped her write headlines for the News-Journal.
"Looking back, I realize that Mike Slinker gently forced me out into the world. I was painfully shy, but when I pinned on my ENMU 'press pass' and headed to an assignment, another person began to emerge," said Ms. Rodgers. "The shy awkward blonde disappeared and a bolder young woman took her place. With camera, pen and notepad in hand, I probably saw the inside of more buildings and talked to more people than most students who attended there for many years."
Another highlight of ENMU was the second semester of her freshman year when she was allowed to take a 300-level creative writing course. She can't recall the husband/wife team that taught it, but will never forget the day the female professor handed back her first essay. At the top of the page were her remarks: "Excellent! Ready for publication."
That essay dealt with her father leaving her mother and six kids for another woman. "That story taught me that I could write about struggle, loss, the death of a marriage, and turn that pain upside-down on its head. In writing about struggle, I found my strength," said Ms. Rodgers.
She says for a small-town girl from a large family, ENUM felt enormous to her at first. She didn't have a car so had to walk everywhere. If she couldn't bum a ride home to Clovis on weekends, she had to figure out how to spend her time and not rely on family but other students–who were in the same boat.
"I learned to take risks," said Ms. Rodgers. "This would come in handy every time I sent a query letter into the world and waited for an acceptance or rejection slip.
Ms. Rodgers at the Wall of Fame at Tarrant County College/NE Campus. The wall honors Distinguished Alumni. She was honored in 2014.
"Even though I didn't graduate from Eastern, I hungered to finish what I started when I was 17. It would take me 30 years and three different colleges to achieve that dream. And then it was only an associate degree. But earning a degree gave me back my confidence."
Raising two sons with her husband, the couple has lived in Arizona, Alaska, Louisiana and Texas (twice).
In addition to her two novels, Ms. Rodgers has been published in numerous newspapers and magazines—including Family Circle Magazine, the Air Force, Army and Navy Times, the Fort Worth Star Telegram, the Albuquerque Journal, and many others.
Ms. Rodgers is the winner of the 2009 MWSA Silver Medal Award for Fiction and the 2010 William E. Mayer Literary Award. Her first novel, The Final Salute, was featured in USA Today, The Associated Press, and Military Times. It reached #1 on Amazon's Top-Rated War Fiction list and was a Book of the Month selection for the Army Wife Network.
Johnnie Come Lately is at a library in New Zealand and the first edition of The Final Salute is in Golden Library at ENMU
Ms. Rodgers' web site is at http://www.kathleenmrodgers.com/.
