The Writer 

I’m Tama Cathers –I collect experiences the way other people collect stamps, then turn them into stories. Writer, biologist, mother, and mostly retired veterinarian who’s walked the entire Appalachian Trail over five years, hiked the Camino Inglés with heart failure, and caught crocodiles in Australia. After five years of Covid brain fog, my mind is back online with stories to tell.

For years, I thought setbacks were total failures, social disgraces. But I’ve learned that failure usually launches me somewhere better – it just takes a lot more time to get there than I’d like. 

I think I based my standards of what it is to be a competent woman on the women protagonists in Anne McCaffrey’s books, and my life has turned out to be a little like that.

The Approach

I started with improv bedtime stories for my daughter, who demanded real answers to complicated questions. Those became children’s books. The Mama Tama stories came later – different tone, different age group, same assumption that kids have rich inner lives. That assumption extends to everything I write.

Life happens – and keeps happening – and I just write. It comes out as poetry, memoir, children’s stories, sci-fi, fiction – whatever form it needs. I write poetry from life’s ridiculous moments, with dark humor. I write memoir about the trails and the transformations. I write children’s stories that trust kids to handle complexity. I write fiction, sometimes gently post-apocalyptic, sometimes just examining what happens when the world shifts.

My writing explores transformation – how we change, how we survive, how we discover what we’re capable of when life strips everything else away.

People need stories. They need to know someone else has been there too – in whatever impossible situation they’re facing. I don’t talk down to anyone. Life is complicated. Stories should match that complexity, not pretend it away.

I’m a little uncomfortable with comfort, so I push edges. The edge changes with each stage of life, but there’s always an edge.

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Tama Cathers

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