About E.J. Meyerer

Growing up in Chicago in the 1950’s, Elizabeth Jean Meyer yearned to be a cowgirl, a nun, and most of all, a mother.  All these dreams have come true at various times in her life, although perhaps not in the exact Technicolor format she once imagined.  As a writer creating with words in the theater of her imagination, she has discovered that she can be anyone and do anything.  One of her favorite quotes is this one from Edward P. Morgan:  "A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy."

The public library and the worlds she found in the books within its walls were her refuge for the first eighteen years of her life.  She remembers standing in front of the fiction shelves and deciding to journey from A to Z, reading at least one book by every author whose name she’d heard.   Among the first “A’s” she read was James Agee’s A Death in the Family.  Then she found Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Little Men, and Eight Cousins.  James Baldwin’s Native Son changed her view of the world.  Each time she returned to the library, she followed her plan of reading recognized authors in systematic order.  By her senior year in high school she’d traveled through the alphabet twice.  (She didn’t know yet that she was equally right- and left-brained.) 

At home she perused the bookshelves in the basement, loaded with an eclectic mix of ‘40s and ‘50s novels, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and Crusader magazines.  There she discovered Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories and poetry, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Complete Sherlock Holmes, and Shakespeare.  The Nancy Drew books, the Hardy Boys series, Alfred Hitchcock’s movies and anything vaguely mysterious drew her into their dark settings.  She is still grateful to the fifth grade teacher who allowed her to read her own mystery stories to the class on Friday afternoons.  There, in a quiet classroom in St. Celestine’s elementary school, she discovered her genre and a mystery fiend was born.

Today her favorite authors are Michael Connelly, Thomas Harris, Patricia Cornwell, Peter Straub, Dean Koontz and the Douglas Preston/Lincoln Child team.  Her mantra is “so many books, so little time.”  Elizabeth enjoys reading three or four books at once.  She usually has a novel, a memoir and a book of non-fiction on her nightstand, along with the Bible, which she knows she should study more than she does. 

She is grateful to her friends, her extended family and especially to her three grown children, who are still teaching her lessons she needs to learn.  She is part of "Dreamweavers", a small Dallas-area writing group with three other talented women, and like Ernest Hemingway, views herself as a perpetual student.  He said, “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”   His words refer to writing, but Elizabeth believes they apply equally well to living.