Gloria McMillan is a research associate (Ph.D. in English) at the University of Arizona (USA) and taught English and literature at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona, co-editor of Orbiting Ray Bradbury’s Mars: Biographical, Anthropological, Literary, Scientific and Other Perspectives, McFarland, 2013.
Cristian Tamas : Hi, Gloria, how is to share a name with a known US actress ? And with other 77 Gloria McMillans, living in US only ? You were Gloria Ptacek, then Gloria Andersson and finally Gloria McMillan, various ipostases of the same person, or different Glorias in different time frames ?
Gloria McMillan : Hi, Cristian, and thank you for allowing me to tell a bit about myself and a new European story collection I am planning. Yes, those are all my names, but I am not the actress, although I am a playwright. And visual artist with many, many projects I juggle. (Don’t we all?)
I was born Gloria Ptacek (a Czech surname, though I am English, Irish and German, too, that I know of), I grew up in East Chicago, Indiana, hometown of Steve Tesich, the Oscar-winning Yugoslav/Serbian-American writer (best original screenplay Oscar for Breaking Away in 1978). Our town was a steel mill town and had—it seemed—40 nationalities, all races and colors. I thought all of the US was like East Chicago up to a certain age and only later found that many towns had a rather more limited palette of peoples. My mom and dad encouraged reading and museum visits in Chicago. By college age, I was helped and nurtured by friends like science fiction BNFs Alex and Phyllis Eisenstein and Martha and Henry Beck. All these people were mentors to me.
An aside: one big bonus in growing up in what some might call the “Industrial Armpit of America”, Whiting-East Chicago-Gary, Indiana, is the freedom to imagine that such a place offers! I imagined the Standard Oil refineries in Whiting as cities of Venus with their tanks and glowing rows of colored lights, steam clouds and icy white ground in the winter, opening up unique vistas for the space traveler. Later I began to create my own genre “Industrial Folk Art” oil paintings where I tried to capture the Turneresque orange and purple hues in the refinery gas burn-off clouds. People actually bought these paintings at a classy Chicago art fair!
So on to Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where I met my late husband Leif Andersson, an astronomy grad student, when he was the first to sign up for the IU Science Fiction Club at the activities Fair in Sept. 1971. Leif had a mind of his own. He saw me in a positive way. Not “Oh, how eccentric.” He always said, “Not better or worse, just different.” We married in Sept. 1973 (timing our wedding so it might correspond to World Cons). Leif was hired at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory by the founder of planetary astronomy, Dr. Gerard Kuiper. Leif’s job was to make a NASA map of the far side of the Moon with British-American astronomer Ewen Whitaker (still going strong at 92). Leif died of cancer in 1979 at the age of 35. A few years later, Ewen Whitaker made sure that the International Astronomical Union honored Leif with a well-deserved Lunar Crater. Leif was mourned by many both here and in Europe because he was a kind and gentle person. In my “second life” as Gloria Andersson the widow, I dropped some things too associated with Leif and took a job tutoring Native American K-through Gr. 12 students in the Tucson Unified School District. I had mentors and friends among the mostly Native American staff who helped me though this dark tunnel in my life. I loved the children that I worked with there. And we got to do Native American arts and crafts with them. One Christmas and winter hols season at Wakefield Middle School, I helped my students fill a twenty-foot-high window in the main entry foyer with Native American animal motives as “stained glass” made from colored plastic sheeting and black paper frames—people gasped when they came into the school. It was lovely. Another world beyond the grimy South Tucson neighborhood. The school kept those “stained glass” pieces up for months after the holidays.
I married Bob McMillan, an astronomer who works with near-earth asteroids at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, in 1981, and have a grown son Chris who is an architectural designer in Los Angeles.
Both Bob and Chris, often smiling and shaking their heads, tag along on many of my projects and quixotic activities. Chris attended his first peace rally in car seat at age one month, for instance.
Cristian Tamas : “Growing up as a child of a steelworker and a cosmetics clerk in an upscale department store made me aware that these different rhetorical communities both had social realities and norms. My parents held differing political, social, and religious views. Father’s working class, Bohemian and Irish Catholic background was different from Mother’s Protestant Anglo-Saxon and Pennsylvania German upbringing… Beyond my family circle, our town was dominated by one industry: steel… The ongoing dialectic between the worlds of my “management” mother and my “labor-oriented” father made me aware that in most areas of important social concern, there will probably be at least two ongoing points of view.” What drove you to study, to learn and to advance ? Are you so kind to present to EUROPA SF’s readers a short overview of you career ? Is someone only the product of it’s parents genes or (also) of a specific socio-economic and cultural background and environment ? Do we have a free will or we’re just drived by bigger forces ?
Gloria McMillan : Cristian, great thought-provoking! As if I had the hubris to answer it (and then she goes on to try…)
I saw the kind of life that D. H. Lawrence saw in the coal mining town where he grew up, the dirty industry but he also saw a window to a wider world via the global capital London. Because of the confines of the immediate world, I felt propelled to the wider one, and—into life. Because I have been fortunate at points when I needed mentors and friends, I try to do that for others. I do not think genes are the sole factor, not at all. I do think luck has something to do with getting anywhere and also just persistence and making yourself visible to possible contacts. My unlikely origins must suggest that self-starters can make it. Look at Ray Bradbury—not to digress—but his origins were totally unpromising and dirt poor. I hope those struggling are listening to me. Seek out a few kindly mentors. Why, Isaac Asimov used to take time to drop notes to me when I was struggling in a “cold water” flat in Gary, Indiana! Getting a note from “Uncle Isaac” kept my spirits up for a week!
After gaining my MA at Indiana University on a small stipend and work as a tutor, I tried various things as a married woman in Tucson: managing the Flandrau Planetarium bookstore, selling weaving and teaching crafts. I studied playwriting and have had several plays produced in Tucson and in the Chicago area.
I decided to go back for the Ph.D. in about 1995 although I was close to 50 because there are grants and opportunities that a Ph.D. still opens the door for. And I love academic research. I could not really get fulltime academic jobs here in Tucson because it is over-crowded with Ph.D.s in English. But I have been active in grants work at the University of Arizona and adjunct teaching at Pima College. I never doubted that options would appear, enhanced by the academic work and new methods learned in rhetoric, especially. If you know rhetoric, you can succeed in getting jobs and influencing audiences.
So my teaching has been practical, geared to needs of the working-class students that Pima College serves, in the main, although I do include science fiction in the literature survey class. [I enclose the Powerpoint slide show about Ray Bradbury that I use in my Writing 102 class.] I want to thank the interdisciplinary array of talent who made our Bradbury essay collection possible. At a recent Los Angeles area public library book signing for my first venture into editing such a collection, a young man got up in the Q & A to speak about struggles he was having. He explained, “Here I am African-American and new to Calfornia, but I never realized that Ray Bradbury and I had so much in common. First, we both love dinosaurs! I didn’t even plan to come here. I just saw the sign.” Then he read his poem about being poor, alone, his struggles and hopes. The librarian came up to me and said she would look out for this young man. If Ray could hover above that crowd, he would have been smiling, for sure. Do you see a pattern appearing? Isn’t this sort of a daisy chain of kind people rippling out to reach more and more others who may be feeling a little weary?
Genes or environment? What do you think?
Cristian Tamas : You’re also a fan of the mystery and a mystery writer, you wrote a novel, “The Blue Maroon Murder” and a mystery play, “Pass the Ectoplasm”. Why is that ? What’s the aesthetic relevance of the mystery genre ?
Gloria McMillan : Well, I worked through many East Chicago memories in both the séance comedy Pass the Ectoplasm (a one-act) and The Blue Maroon Murder. The mystery is set in the University of Chicago’s English Department (more mysteries are set in English departments than any other college department). I wanted to explore the gulf between scientists and humanities people, almost open warfare at times. The protagonist, Dinah Cassidy, is a young widow and I drew upon what that was like to create her struggles to reconstruct a person from ashes. Snobbery in the university against science fiction is also a sub-text theme and comic relief!
Cristian Tamas : Why do you admire writers as Jane Langton (author of children’s literature and murder mystery novels) and Amanda Cross (pen name of Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, also author of mystery novels) ? Are they role models for you as university professors having an extracurricular lucrative hobby ?
Gloria McMillan : I enjoy mystery writer Jane Langton because she is like Charles Dickens, so good at satirizing her pretentious native New England, Harvard, and also university English departments. I loved her mystery Emily Dickinson is Dead, set at an Amherst, MA, conference devoted to the poet. If you ever wanted a graphic demonstration of that old saying that “academic politics is so vicious because there is so little at stake,” then this novel is it. Langton also draws architectural line illustrations in her mysteries and has studied astronomy, which she brings into play in some books. But it is her sure hand with satire and character that I most admire. Amanda Cross does similar satire of university English Departments in her Death in a Tenured Position.
Yes, both these women are truly inspirational and multi-talented for the rest of us.
Cristian Tamas : Your first husband was the famous Swedish astronomer and Big Name SF Fan Leif Erland Andersson (1944-1979). Leif Erland was a child prodigy who won the Swedish television quiz show 10.000-kronorsfrågan (“The 10,000 crown question”) twice, the first time at age 16. At 24 (in 1968), he received a scholarship to an observatory in Sicily after which he went to Indiana University Bloomington to complete his Ph.D. degree. He later worked at the Lunar & Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona in Tucson, he calculated the first observable transits of Pluto and Charon in the early 1980s and a crater on the Moon was named after him. Did he influence you concerning science fiction ?
Gloria McMillan : Certainly, Leif was an inspiration. He was a self-starter who took his love of learning and built a career from it. He never even told me about winning the TV quiz in Sweden until either just before or just after we were married. I guess Leif believed that such information about him would create a barrier. He didn’t like being thought special. He was just the same Leif talking to the janitor on his rounds when Leif worked late or speaking to the university president (not that he had many occasions to so that.)
Leif loved astronomy and science fiction equally. He never was ambitious and whatever he achieved it was because he loved learning about that thing. We complimented each other in that Leif had the logic and math that was not my forte. We went to the world famous SF collector-editor Forry Ackerman’s birthday in Los Angeles. We went on odd-themed day trips and SF-themed travel. We had a great time. It was just too short. I wished more for him but he did so much in his life.
I married another astronomer and that continues to amaze me. The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory secretary invited people along to a Thanksgiving dinner the fall after after Leif died. We sat at the farthest table out in the kitchen from the blasting football game in the living room. That is how I met Bob. He knew we both didn’t like team sports and he found out that I liked classical music and SF.
Cristian Tamas : Which were the first SF texts and books that you read ? Did you follow the developments within the imaginary domain from the last decades ? What is your conclusion ? Has science fiction any meaning and any relevance for the earthlings ? Why read literature as it wouldn’t make you rich and famous ?
Gloria McMillan : I read a book called The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Canadian-born writer Eleanor Cameron when I was seven years old. That did it. I was hooked. Then I read the Heinlein books for children. And Asimov’s Lucky Star stories.
I have read a bit of cyberpunk and steampunk fiction in the last decades, but my favorite style of science fiction is hard science fiction. I mean writers such as Stephen Baxter. A new American science fiction writer is Homer Hickam is one I have started to read. Hickam uses his coal mining family background to faithfully depict a mining community on the moon in his Helium Three series. Hickam is not young but he has started writing science fiction later in life. He is the author of the popular memoir The Rocket Boys, that was made into a film (October Sky) about a young coal miner’s son in West Virginia who dreamed of becoming a rocket engineer.
I also appreciate the broader speculative fiction and have read some of that. I see Europeans, especially, having this long history of philosophical fiction that spans both science fiction and other genres. Our late friend Josef Nesvadba of Prague wrote in the broader philosophical style of speculative fiction. I think his last novel Peklo Benes (Benes’ Hell) was a polito-philosophical speculative fiction text. With my one grandfathers having been of Czech descent, the mysteries of that language have fascinated me. I study Czech off and on and have made some partial translations of untranslated Nesvadba texts. I wish somebody would translate Karel Čapek’s dog book Dashenka. He wrote fairy tales for his dog in that one. What a loss for English speakers. Čapek not only created the word ‘robot’ in his play R.U.R., but he had this whimsy and punning that we do not –yet—experience in an English version of Dashenka. My Czech skill is limited and playful language calls for a master translator.
People will always read literature to escape the limits and bounds of their limited life spans, I think.
Cristian Tamas : Why do you think that Hugo Gernsback is presented as the Founding Father of the American science fiction ? Isn’t such a concept neglecting the role and the works of the true American SF fathers as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Fitz-James O’Brien, J.D. Whelpley, Edward Bellamy, Mark Twain, Jack London, Edgar Rice Burroughs ? Are they only forerunners, authors of “proto-SF” ? (also “Examples of this type of work existed even across the Atlantic, notably in two novels by William Dean Howells, the dean of late 19th-century American letters. In Howells’s A Traveler from Altruria (1894) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907), he described Altruria, a utopian world that combined the foundations of Christianity and the U.S. Constitution to produce an “ethical socialism” by which society was guided.” – Encylopedia Britannica). The result of Mr.Gernsback’s (and his imitators) frenetic commercial activity : ”…creating a torrent of other pulp publications, this practice soon yielded so much fruit that many people, especially Americans, falsely assumed that Americans had created science fiction.” – Encylopedia Britannica
Gloria McMillan : I have no study to back this, but I think Hugo Gernsback gets all the credit because science fiction fen want to keep SF as a leisure genre, not an academic subject. Firmly rooting SF with the pulps and Gernsback is a good-natured way to “snub’ high art, part of the long US project of anti-intellectualism.
Hugo Gernsback’s creation is pulp fiction. The others mentioned above are, or have become, classics of the sort that American students are forced to read in classes. We have our Modern Language Association fantasy and science fiction journal Extrapolation, but most non-academics do not read it. The above writers get due credit in places like Extrapolation. I think that science fiction readers have usually been assumed to be lower middle-class (I believe there is a demographic study on this?), so many US fen do not have much by way of college training for literature. Some care about high art roots and most do not. Academics get toleration when we try to give panels on, for instance, Verne and Wells here. “RelaxaCons are not MLA conferences,” folks are keen to remind the enthusiastic literary historian.
Because the academics who could clarify the origins of US science fiction and who can—if asked—contextualize it, are merely tolerated (low attendance at panels), the word never seems to get out. I run into many fen here who seem blissfully unaware even of US classic SF writers (Asimov, Simak, Heinlein).
That is part of the general lack of interest in history of any kind. The US may be more prone to this than Europe. In his science fiction text, W. D. Howells drew upon the movement of Christian socialism at the end of the 19th C., which was quite progressive. Christian socialism’s most famous exponent was the famous British journalist William T. Stead, who went to the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition and wrote a cautionary tale called If Christ came to Chicago. Stead was quite friendly with Jane Addams, who founded the Hull-House settlement in Chicago and who later shared a Nobel Peace Prize. He made clear who the new philistines were by naming prominent names among the Chicago elite. That movement formed the basis of the Progressives in the early 20th Century United States.
Now the ideas found in Howells’ A Traveler from Altruria, etc., have bled into other fiction, so nothing much is really lost. It is only that when reinventing the wheel or plagiarizing from Howells, we do not see the intertextuality spelled out.
Cristian Tamas : Do you think that a pulp SF and a “literary” SF are existing ? Is the pulp SF the dominating variety of the genre ?
Gloria McMillan : What an understatement. Literary SF is the small rodent to pulp SF’s (and film, digital gaming) giant reptiles. I can remember Martha Beck’s tales of when SF conventions were composed of people with spectacles who looked at home in the library who huddled together in the anti-intellectual 1950s and 60s for warmth. Now the younger generation has some in it who swagger into conventions bristling weaponry and cutting a swath, brushing aside lesser beings. Bullying has arrived as a positive value in SF and I see the low end fiction and films as responsible. Our umbrella covers everything from utopian peaceniks to Conans, but militarists may be making the most noise at US science fiction conventions if my limited sampling is an indication. I can’t really generalize but I was saddened to read of a panel offered at one US Con that boasted in some way that “blood and guts make SF better fiction.” It may be my limits of understanding, but where is the “sense of wonder” in such a topic? I understand that a mirror image exists in some Eastern (and other) European SF of bluster and violent military “techno-thrillers.”
As a writer, I can see that conflict is necessary for plot, but to worship violence for its own sake is not a healthy trend. As science retreats from the center of science fiction, that void will be filled.
Cristian Tamas : Do you read Fantasy ? What is Fantasy in your opinion ? In Europe we’re differentiating between Fantastika (grosso modo la litterature fantastique) and Fantasy, the later being mainly imported from the anglo-saxon countries, and having conquered the market of the world imaginary domain…
Gloria McMillan : My preference is science fiction so I cannot speak much to current developments in fantasy, except to say that the markets show more fantasy than SF. There have been creative threads of fairy novels, such as our local Tucson writer Janne Lee Simner’s Bones of Faerie. Her post-apocalyptic beings have little in common with fairy tales I used to read. There is creativity in this sort of genre mashing, I think.
Europe possesses a broader stream of Fantastika that produces such rich unconscious evocations as Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” European writers combine pychoanalysis and myth and come up with surreal texts that I find very satisfying. Zoran Zivkovich’s “The Tea Shop” is like that.
Cristian Tamas : You’re the co-editor of an exegesis volume dedicated to Ray Bradbury (Orbiting Ray Bradbury’s Mars: Biographical, Anthropological, Literary, Scientific and Other Perspectives, McFarland, 2013). Why Bradbury ? His fictional Mars is still relevant to our contemporaries ? Or just due to the fact that “…his work was always more Fantasy and Horror than SF… He is, in effect, a fantasist, both whimsical and sombre, in an older, pastoral tradition.” – Peter Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction) and that’s the actual zeitgeist ?
Gloria McMillan : Bradbury is many things. He is, for one, the best chronicler and interrogator of US imperialism to date. That—if nothing else—should make him a must read for this generation. Bradbury’s prolific output alternately poetically celebrates and laments the US sense of itself, our claim of “exceptionalism,” of being God’s chosen people, and our Manifest Destiny to take all our little US habits and follies (up to and including genocide) off to the stars. The astronauts bring chicken pox germs and wipe out the Martians, except for a small remnant, in The Martian Chronicles.
One of the stories, “And the Moon Be Still as Bright” explores one astronaut’s recoil from the insensitivity of his mates. The expected nuclear war on earth also occurs during the course of The Martian Chronicles and leaves only the Mars colony as survivors. You might call this a ‘twofer’ in species destructive capability. Instead of Wells’ cold and scientific Martian gaze, we come to Mars with our usual superficial American good spirits. We destroy life on Mars without even meaning to.
Many times, Bradbury is called regional—and he is. He is called the most American SF writer—and he is. But he is one of the first US writers to step outside the box and to allow us to look in to see ourselves as others see us.
Bradbury speaks to Americans as a voice in the wilderness for care and thought before self-aggrandizement. He wrote his stories that became The Martian Chronicles in the late 1940s at the height of the McCarthy Era and the fears of the Cold War. We would do well to keep that context in mind. Is Bradbury out-of-date?
NASA loves Ray Bradbury because he championed space research. He has inspired many astronomers in the US and abroad to pursue a career in science. Several of these planetary astronomers have written chapters in our essay collection Orbiting Ray Bradbury’s Mars. Peter Smith, the Principal Investigator of the NASA Phoenix Mars Lander, wrote in his preface to our collection that the cautions about disturbing others’ environment and cultures that Ray Bradbury communicates in his stories helped him to design his lander. There are contradictions in wanting to go to space, but we are a species with dreams. Bradbury adds cautions to the dreams. Don’t we need both?
Cristian Tamas : One of the best books on Ray Bradbury (space age and the space program, too), was Oriana Fallaci’s “Se il sole muore”, 1965 (If the Sun Dies, Atheneum, New York City, 1966). Do you know this book ?
Gloria McMillan : I do not know the book—yet. The key word is “yet” as the Yoga lady on TV says about positions we cannot do—yet.
Cristian Tamas : “The invisible friends: The Lost Worlds of Henry James and H. G. Wells” and “Somebody Stole My Gal: Word Cluster Analysis of Exogamy Fears in Stoker’s Dracula”, both critical essays of yours. Henry James and H.G.Wells, two of the most important writers of humankind and Bram Stoker, a submediocre author of kitschy lurid gore. How come this interest ?
Gloria McMillan : First, “Somebody Stole My Gal” is a study of Stoker’s Dracula using computer literary analysis, of which I am a big supporter. Humanities replies too much on rank and credentials of scholars to build its knowledge base, having no math to keep it neutral and allow those below to revise those at the top. By proving that all the British characters used ‘blood’ in racist or class-biased ways via computer content analysis and that the character Dracula did not use ‘blood’ in these ways, I show that the novel is racist. In the humanities, one would have to be a top don at Harvard or Oxford to make a new claim stick because who is speaking weighs more than what is being said. But Extrapolation understood this and published the essay.
I am all for better relations among nations. The damage that Stoker’s novel Dracula has done is not known in the US. The same may hold for the UK. Funnily, enough, one friend in the Ph.D. program said that Dracula was outlawed in her native Hungary as racist. Post-colonial scholar Stephen Arata made this claim first in 1990 in his “The Occidental Tourist: ‘Dracula’ and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonialization” but I made the proof with the numbers. I understand that Europeans are more aware of this racist side to the novel. When one text as skewed as Dracula becomes the main knowledge that a whole anglophone culture has of a region such as Southeastern Europe, this is not good. The analogy might be knowing about Italy only because of the more violent Borgias, but not knowing that Italy also produced Leonardo da Vinci.
As for my essay “The Invisible Friends,” about H. G. Wells and Henry James friendship and later feud, this shut off the potential for the English language novel to be a genre of ideas. Virginia Woolf essentially killed that possibility for the English language novel in her how-to book for modernist writers, Modern Fiction. At one point, Henry James wanted to collaborate with Wells on a Mars novel. James knew he had no ideas to speak of about space, but he offered to write the “rich inner lives” of the characters. This made the young crowd of James “groupies” such as Woolf a bit envious, so she bided her time. Once the Wells-James split happened, Woolf labeled all Wells inventiveness and science as “ephemeral things” along with historical events and politics that had no place in artistic fiction. H. G. Wells has not been included in college courses about Modern British Fiction because of this. The English language novel may now be breaking with the Woolf taboos but only slowly. Until now, high modern values include ambiguity, the novel’s true subject being the elegance, subtlety, and originality of its language. Modernist fiction is all about self-reflecting on the language usage. Content is not important compared to the way it is expressed in words. Wells had a different view, thinking that there was little content in those dreary ‘eternal verities’ like love and death that the Moderns showcased over and over. So my study is about how scientists think and write and how the humanities think and write.
Cristian Tamas : What are your next projects ?
Gloria McMillan : Well, now I am collecting stories for a planned collection of English-translated European short stories. I hope to include plenty of SE and Eastern European writers as a bridge to gain international insights. We only can appreciate others if we get to know them by encountering their cultures. I am pleased that we have had some European SF collections in English since 2000, but I think the last English-language European SF collection printed here in the US was in 2008, so it is time.
If anybody wishes to submit an SF story in English, just send it to: glomc@dakotacom.net
I note that you and Roberto Mendes have a 2013 online European Speculative Fiction anthology published in English. So do check that one out!
Another project: I hope that we keep science in science fiction and have a “hard” science fiction writers’ workshop project underway here in Tucson to promote that. We have to give as much support to writers of hard science fiction as to those writing fantasy and horror to help grow a new generation of writers.
Cristian Tamas : In your opinion what is the purpose of the existence of human species ? Does a human life have a meaning ? Are we all doomed to fail ?
Gloria McMillan : I think we all have to answer those questions for ourselves.
Cristian Tamas : Kindly address some words to EUROPA SF’s readers ! Thank you !
Gloria McMillan : I am so pleased to know of you and all the fine national and regional European SF cons that are going on all the time. So far in my foray into current European fandom, I have been very amused by all the French and Jules Verne projects. We are in the H. G. Wells Society and I suggested to them that they do some kind of Wells video since the tour of the Jules Verne Museum is wonderful and can draw new young readers to Verne. Of course, I may never get to many of these but so much is on the Internet from European SF clubs that I feel that I almost have been there. Thanks for the chance to get to know all of you!
Thank you all for what you are doing. Thank you for valuing your past great writers and growing a new generation of writers. And thanks, Cristian, for interviewing me. I am amazed at you research revealed in the questions!
© Cristian Tamas & Gloria McMillan
“The Blue Maroon Murder” by Gloria McMillan
Gloria McMillan has a Ph.D. in English and has taught at both the University of Arizona and Pima College in Tucson. She is also a produced playwright of mystery plays, including Pass the Ectoplasm.
Her Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/gloria.mcmillan.39
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyVAbtVGUu4
