About Phyllis Gebauer

I started out teaching Spanish in junior high school.

Well, no, not really.

I started out being born to Swedish-American parents on the north side of Chicago,  where I went to elementary and high school. Then I got a B.S. in Spanish from Northwestern University, and with my Phi Beta Kappa key hidden under my blouse, got a job in the typing pool at the Gas Company. Eventually, I moved up to Personnel Receptionist, a job I liked but had to give up a year after I got married because--1950's--the Gas Company had a "Married Woman's Policy" that said a married woman could only stay on the payroll a year so as not to deprive a man (perhaps a returning GI) of the livelihood he needed to support his family.

Strange times, those, but I was young and unprotesting so I applied at The Northern Trust Company over on LaSalle Street, learned how to use the IBM Proof Machine, and soon became a Training Instructor. That job was fun, but after a vacation trip to Colorado, my husband Fred and I longed to move West. So he applied at Boeing up in Seattle, and when he got a job helping design the 707 Wing, I quit my banking job and moved to Seattle with him.

Our drive cross-country was a lark, but once we got there and settled down in a rented house, I went back to my old skill--typing--this time purchase orders for a shipbuilding company on Harbor Island. That job was boring (to say the least) so I applied at Boeing and was hired to write business letters and memos (and, of course, type them) in the 707 Administration Group.

That job changed both of our lives because an engineer from Denmark sat at the desk beside mine, and chatting with him and other "alien" engineers made me yearn to visit Europe and experience the cultures I'd read so much about. Fred was a little hard to convince--having spent three years in the army slogging across Europe in WW II--but he was an adventurous soul, so in 1959 we both took a three-month leave of absence from our jobs to tour Europe in a Hillman convertible. What a joy that trip was. And when I got home--having had to speak Spanish and French to get around--it finally dawned on me that with my degree in Spanish and minor in Education, I should be doing more than office work. I should maybe--gulp--become a teacher.

THAT was when I started teaching Spanish in Junior High School.

Believe me, the change from clerk-typist to classroom-control-officer wasn't easy, but I hung in there, made friends with the music teacher, and through him met an aspiring novelist who, years later, was to inspire me to write a book, thereby changing my life even more. In the meantime, Fred became what used to be known as an aero bracero--an aerospace worker who changed jobs and locales as often as a Mexican field-hand--and in that capacity, moved from city to city and state to state, depending on which aerospace project needed design engineers where. And I, as a loving wife, moved with him: from Seattle to San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Philadelphia, Houston, San Diego, and finally Los Angeles. And when I couldn't find a teaching job in a new locale, it seemed only natural to spend my days writing and sending out short stories.

I'd always been a voracious reader--as a kid, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Three Musketeers, Count of Monte Cristo--and I'd always kept a diary that I could lock with a tiny key. Also, when I first got out of college, I'd taken a class in short-story writing at the downtown Chicago Y where the teacher told me I had talent and would succeed, if only I didn't give up. In addition, from early marriage on, I'd kept a journal in which I recorded my secret thoughts, and when we went on vacation, a detailed trip-log in which I described not only what we saw and did, but the people we met. So, without my knowing it, writing was apparently in my blood.

Yet I didn't just sit and write when I was unemployed. In Houston I got a Teaching Fellowship at the University, then my Master's in Spanish; in other cities, I took post-graduate courses in linguistics, film production, screen writing. Took writing courses at local colleges. Attended writers' conferences. Even--ta, da!--won a few prizes. Then, when our novelist-friend published his second book to wild acclaim, I decided I'd bring in the bucks by writing a novel too.            

Heaven knows, by then Fred and I really needed the money. Back in the late sixties, we'd made a short, 16mm movie with a couple of friends that won an award at the Bellevue, Washington Film Festival. Then, based on that "success," we'd quit our jobs and flown to Spain to make the first of what we envisioned as a series of films for high-school Spanish classes that would excite teenagers more than "Juan and His Little Burro Go to Market." That was an exciting and expensive project. We bought a new 16mm Bolex, rented a car, and spent an entire summer touring the entire country shooting film "on the wing" of teenagers having fun in Madrid, on the beach on the Costa del Sol, and in little towns. Then, back in Seattle, we discovered our filmmaking friends had moved to Santa Barbara so we moved down there too. Rented a Moviola, taught ourselves to lay in a sound track, and turned out a film called "Somos Espanoles" that was distributed for years by what is now a division of Simon & Schuster. Unfortunately, that project didn't bring in much money, nor did a film we made for a Santa Barbara commune, so--considering how much we'd spent--our bank account was almost drained. Fred used his artistic bent and knowledge of casting to turn out a series of pewter pendants that he called "Viking Primitives" and sold at craft fairs and on commission to merchants in the Santa Ynez Valley. Still, that didn't bring in much cash so--like it or not--we had to move to L.A. so he could go back into engineering.

That was another major life-change, but every weekday morning after he set off to work at a drafting board, I sat down at my electric typewriter, determined to raise our income by turning out a best-selling novel. I'd already written a book in Santa Barbara--a suspense tale based on some strange experiences we'd had filming that commune--then had brought it to the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference from which an editor took it back with him to New York. But what do you know? It didn't sell. So for the second one I used my knowledge of Spanish life and customs--augmented by what I'd seen and heard during our three month's stay in Franco Spain--to write a sexy political comedy called The Pagan Blessing that was published in hardback by Viking, got good reviews, and opened the door for me to lecture and lead workshops at various conferences and eventually to teach fiction at UCLA Extension. Then, in 2006, Fithian Press put the book out in paperback and it now has movie agents (Cine\Lit), who have adapted it into a screenplay and gained the interest of some well-known Spanish producers.

As for me, I'm still teaching and writing fiction, though after Fred unexpectedly died in 1998 from complications of his rheumatoid arthritis, I spent eight tumultuous years leading workshops in "Writing Your Way through Grief and Loss" while turning out a memoir that started out as a self-help book but ended up as Hot Widow--a sad, funny, fast-moving story about the unusual (and sexy) things that happened to me my first two years alone. It was a hard book to write (I guess confessions always are), but now that it's done, I'm working on the first of a series of comic mysteries featuring a male and a female senior sleuth.

Also, when the spirit moves me, I take time off to rejuvenate my brain and body by going on a trip--sometimes alone, sometimes with a tour-group, sometimes with the English widower I met in the opening pages of Hot Widow. This latter is a trip in itself. So far, I've joined him four times in England, once in Italy to celebrate my 75th birthday, once in Greece to cruise the islands. In March 2009, we spent three weeks in Australia, the highlights of the trip being a performance of “Madame Butterfly” in the Sydney Opera House, traveling from Adelaide to Alice Springs on the famous overnight train, the Ghan, and--most thrilling of all--flying to Uluru (Ayres Rock) in a single-engine Cessna!.

And when I’m not traveling or teaching, I write, write, write, and love it.

So that's the essential "me." If you'd like a formal listing of my publications, professional associations, honors and awards, and so on,
click here.