Sylvia Dickey Smith's roots are buried in the land of pirates, cowboys, Cajuns and Paleo-Indians.  

She grew up in the 40's and 50's in the southeast Texas town of Orange, the last "get off" of I-10 before Louisiana. 

Before the war, Orange was a sleepy town of farmers, ranchers and sawmill workers.  Lumber export of longleaf yellow pine and cypress grew into big business and the accompanying wealth brought a certain level of culture and aristocracy to the proud, quiet community.

In 1940 the population of Orange was 17,382.  But that all changed during WW II when the U.S. Navy awarded Orange shipbuilders a major contract to build destroyers to fight the war.  Almost overnight, the population exploded, and by 1950 the town's population doubled to 40,567.

Sylvia's childhood came during a maelstrom of social upheaval and change. She grew up in a makeshift housing addition appropriately called Riverside, built on swampland filled in with sand. During that period women were first "Rosie the riveters," and then, after the war, sent back home to stay bare of feet and pregnant. Feminism flourished in some parts of the country, but not in Orange, Texas. Not in her home.

Her Scots-Irish paternal ancestors immigrated to South Carolina in 1767 from County Limerick.  In the 1800's, their adventurous descendents moved to the Orange area, reared their children, built destroyers, worked the cotton fields and the creosote plants and finally built the chemical refineries.

Her love of story was born listening to her father recall antics of his childhood. About the time he wrapped a sweet potato in Christmas gift wrap and gave it to a girl for Christmas, and of his shame when he realized he'd hurt her feelings. Of pranks he and his cousin played on unsuspecting friends and strangers. She watched her father laugh as he recalled the tales and realized that telling the stories must be even more fun than listening to them. She, too, began to tell her stories and in third grade, her teacher noted on her report card that she excelled in story telling. She graduated from Lutcher Stark High School, the home of the Bengal Tigers. Married, she moved out of Orange with her husband and later started her family. 

In the seventies she moved to Trinidad, West Indies with her husband and children and lived and worked there for six years. There she developed a love for other cultures, races and religions.

She graduated with a B.A. in Sociology and a M.Ed in Educational Psychology at mid-life, from the University of Texas at El Paso. In her Freshman English class her professor encouraged her to develop her gift of writing.  But lack of confidence and other personal struggles led her down another path.

The drive to write haunted her dreams.  Ideas for fiction and non-fiction alike turned into a tall stack of spiral notebooks tucked away in a drawer.

When she took early retirement at sixty-two and a friend said, "you need to write," Sylvia knew the time had come.  

From her earliest memories, Sylvia had a deep spiritual base. Her father died when she was middle-aged and she entered a spiritual wilderness-wandering which led her to study ancient religions. She is particularly drawn to feminist and metaphorical theology. Study of Jungian psychology, mythology, and cultural anthropology matured her spiritual nature. As a licensed psychotherapist she brings an innate sense of human nature to her communication skills.

Sylvia now lives in Round Rock, Texas with her husband, Bill, a retired Army Colonel. She is the proud mother of four children, all grown and gone, and excellent writers themselves. She is the grandmother of lots of delightful, energetic grandchildren scattered around the country. She writes in a bedroom lined with books and papers and CD drives. When guests come, she vacates her writing room and sleeps late, rather than getting up before dawn to write. When she isn't writing, she gardens, reads, cares for an ailing mother and allows herself to simply be.