K.M. Huber studied theater in Oregon before moving to New York City to work on her writing and poetry. She then earned her Master’s of Social Work, where she worked for over a decade before moving to Lima, Peru, then to Bolivia, Costa Rica, Atlanta, and back to Lima. She continued to do social work her entire career, and now lives in Tennessee with her husband, where she spends her days writing stories about the people, cultures, and places that have impacted her the most.

Picture a sporty low-riding red Barracuda with white racing-stripes, a white interior, and a pair of floormats featuring Yosemite Sam brandishing a big-barreled gun in each hand. It’s 1976, a blazing late August, and the car is stuck in the high Rockies on a road under construction. A jagged rock has wedged itself under the car, preventing movement. Add two barefoot fresh college graduates in the front seats, windows down, while six construction workers circle around the stranded vehicle, studying its undercarriage, and taking bets.

My friend Linda was at the wheel charming one of the workers, while I leaned out of the window on my side to explain to another fellow in a hard hat that we were on our way from Portland, Oregon to New York City with a stop in Annapolis to deliver the car to its owner. I’m not quite sure why he laughed, but suddenly those six burly fellows were lifting the car in unison, with us in it. They set us down a few feet over, with no harm done to the Barracuda’s underbelly nor any rupturing of its oil pan, which we had not even realized was at risk.

We were 22, full of dreams, and eager to return to the Big Apple where we had spent half our junior year immersed in the world of theater with a dozen other students and one professor. From our home in the Picadilly Hotel, we had a front row view of the Marlboro Man blowing giant smoke rings from the billboard over Times Square. As Pacific Northwesterners from non-urban areas, neither of us had expected to fall in love with the city, but we did. Once back on campus, we worked double shifts to save money for an apartment and, the summer after graduation before the new students arrived, we pooled our resources, packed up our few belongings, and set out (cue Sinatra) “to be a part of it, New York, New York!” We would write, dance, do theater, and make art in the city that never sleeps.

For the next ten years I felt like a character in a novel waiting to be written, too busy with life to do more than take notes and collect data. At least my first job, in a slow architect’s office, gave me time to write letters. It was the era before office photocopiers, but they had a large machine to reproduce architectural blueprints. Before mailing my letters, I would lay out the pages in careful lines, feed them into the machine, then cut the big blue sheet into pages for my journal and fancied myself as a “creative writer in her blue period.”

One day, as an assistant teacher in a later job, I was reading “Leo the Late Bloomer” to first graders when I started to feel an odd identification with the little tiger who wasn’t able to do what his fellow cubs were doing. Although it seemed that my life was blooming in a thousand ways, there was something important that wasn’t happening. I wasn’t writing.

What did happen was love, and a graduate degree, and providing services to unions and schools, and commuting to work by subway, and spending six months of my first pregnancy taking the local train because the express trains didn’t stop often enough for me to get out in time to puke into the nearest trash can. Oh, I collected lots of stories, but wrote only one.

When we moved to my husband’s hometown of Lima, Peru with two small boys, what had started as a hopeful new government quickly deteriorated into a brutal and violent undeclared civil war. I stored more stories in the corners of life with young children while teaching at the American school and correcting papers by candlelight because the electrical towers were constantly being bombed.

Not long after our daughter was born, I quit my job and started writing in earnest. I got paid $50 for a poem and thought I had made it! At that time, everything was written on typewriters with carbon copies and sent by physical mail, so international postage was a major investment. I mailed off stories, poems, and essays to prestigious U.S. publications, unaware that there were formatting protocols or that ellipses were limited to three dots. I received so many rejection letters that I considered using them to wallpaper the bathroom. Finally, one overseer of slush piles suggested that I double-space and use 1-inch margins if I wanted to be taken seriously. So much for saving on postage by condensing more words into fewer pages.

Though woefully out-of-sync with the U.S. writing world, I was in-sync with some international artists. I became the poet/playwright for multi-media collaborations. My Spanish improved, and I began to find my groove. Then I lost it, having to switch gears for a move to Costa Rica. My husband’s job led to other moves, each of which took at least sixth months to start to feel settled.

When my daughter started pre-school, I started writing a novel. I found a writing group. And I began to learn the ropes, tropes and slippery slopes of critiquing and sharing work. Two countries later, I had a 360,000-word novel featuring the anti-war movements orbiting 1917 and 1971 through a college freshman who discovers a box filled with never-mailed letters-to-the-editor and her recently widowed grandmother who wrote them. Oddly enough, it wasn’t the unwieldy length that bothered the agents I queried, so much as the fact that most of the action took place in a retirement community. Two offered to reconsider if I’d turn it into a trilogy and focus more on the college student.

I put the novel away and stuck to short stories and poetry that I could squeeze out between work and kids, and new complications with aging parents. By then, my daughter was thirteen and asked me if I could please make my next book something she and her friends would want to read? Something historical, set in Peru, with characters overcoming intercultural misunderstandings, a touch of romance, and a nod to climate change.

As it happened, we soon moved back to Peru. She dug into school, and I literally dug into research, volunteering at a dig to start. I read widely, interviewed archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians, and had conversations with a British archaeobotanist that led to making a documentary about deforestation in southern Peru. I learned about Andean cosmovision and ancient healing practices and plant medicines. It all coalesced in a book about the unexpected destiny of a girl from a long line of healers who preferred to paint ceramics and practice sacred dance rituals.

Queries resulted in the standard “not a good fit” replies but an editor in Peru liked it. He translated it into Spanish and it was published by a small Peruvian press in 2023 to good reviews. The English version is coming out with SparkPress May 2025, and a sequel in 2026.

At seventy, I’m a late bloomer in the publishing field. But in my craft and creative life, I consider myself a perennial. Even when I wasn’t actively writing, I was gathering seeds.

After writing Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés Reyes continued with workshops on archetypes, including “The Late Bloomer.” She reminds us that some plants are meant to bloom late in the season, and insists that “Nothing of your life has been wasted: for everything there truly is a season.”

With several projects on the back burner and others percolating, I’m looking forward to my season as an author. And who knows? Maybe my first novel will find its season as well.

Call of the Owl Woman by K.M. Huber

Patya’s world is torn apart when her grandmother dies, leaving her with nothing but music and dance to cope, and the elusive message that Payta’s destiny to become a healer means more than she thinks. After her home is hit by a catastrophic earthquake, Patya must help the healers, but in doing so, uncovers something she never thought possible. Something that could help her father and the other Water Guardians protect the Nasca people, their home, and her little brother, who will be sacrificed by the religious extremists set on taking control of her home.

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