Author of The Love of the Tayamni
http://www.tayamni.net
T. A. McLaughlin, or Teresa grew up in the deep backwoods of Lee County, Mississippi. The closest towns to her childhood home were Saltillo, population 530, and Tupelo, at that time, about 15,000.
Like the young boy in the first book of her series, The Love of the Tayamni, she played in the woods and lived a childhood isolated from both adults and other children. She created a life alone, separate from the adults who abused her and the other children who bullied her. She created herself.
As her father frequently said, it was as if she'd been plopped down in Mississippi from another planet. She couldn't be more different from the people around her.
When adults asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she said she wanted to be an artist and live in Paris. When she walked the quarter mile down a dirt road to her cousins' house, she pretended the leaves flapping against each other in the breeze were an audience applauding. She saw herself as Audrey Hepburn or Vivien Leigh on the stage of a New York City theater.
She read the great authors, she studied classical singing, She learned French, German, and Italian. She studied at the Koninklijk Conservatorium and had a professional career touring Europe and the US. Finally, she settled down, married a wonderful, loving, kind man, and adopted a younger woman as her daughter. She had created herself and her life.
Told this way, her life sounds like a series of successes. But, she experienced it as continuous struggle. Being physically abused during childhood and adolescence left her drowning in painful memories and self doubt. You might say her struggles to prove herself were in reality, to prove to her father, the chief among her abusers, that she could actually be her own person. In 2009, Ms McLaughlin transitioned from male to female. Ms McLaughlin attempts to weave stories from her own life into the sci-fi series, The Love of the Tayamni.
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