BIOGRAPHY of Chris Woodyard

I was born in Columbus, Ohio and I'm a Scorpio!  I’ve always said that if there is such a thing as a gene for writing and publishing, I inherited it. My father was a technical writer/editor and ran the "print shop" at Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, while my mother’s father had a print shop in his basement in Crestline, Ohio. He had a big side-wheel press and I used to love to watch him print menus, wedding invitations, and school programs.

I always knew I wanted to be a writer. I learned to read before I went to school and was reading at an eight-grade level in first grade. So I was very, very bored when the other kids were struggling with "See Jane run" and I either sneaked a look at a book under my desk or made up stories to keep myself entertained.

I went to Dublin Schools when Dublin was just a little farm community. My graduating class was 95 students. I was the second-ugliest kid in my grade and nobody—not even the teachers—liked me very well. School wasn’t my favorite place to be. All I wanted to do was read, which didn’t make my math or gym teachers very happy. My favorite thing to do was hang out in the library. In high school I worked in the library, processing books and shushing fellow students. Throughout my school years I wrote constantly and entered a lot of writing contests. I usually won something because I was very good at imitating older, published writers.

The other thing I did well as a child was music. I started piano lessons in second grade. I also played the clarinet in band. In sixth grade, my piano teacher got married and since I couldn’t find another one, I started taking organ lessons. I got good enough that, at age eleven, I started playing professionally in church. The money I earned, partially paid for my college and living expenses after graduation. I still play the organ at my Lutheran church here in Dayton.

College was like Heaven for me. I went away to Bowling Green State University where, for the first time, I had teachers who liked me, thought I was interesting, and invited me home to dinner. The BGSU Library was a treasure trove of books I never dreamed existed. The University also gave me a book scholarship which let me begin my book collecting. And I did a great deal of writing, mostly poetry.

I started college thinking that I would be a librarian. Unfortunately, about that time, all the libraries were switching over to computerized systems. I didn’t want to work with machines—I wanted to work with books! So I switched to a major in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and moved back to Columbus to go to Ohio State University.

OSU is a much bigger school than BGSU and I found it hard to adjust. Still, my classes were very interesting, the teachers were very good, and I got acquainted with some new people through teaching poetry workshops through the Free University. I won some awards for my poetry and was published in The Ohio Journal. After I graduated, I had planned to go on to graduate school in art history. But I was tired of school and instead went into business, running an antique clothing store that provided me with quite a good income and a place to live for about eight years.

After I sold the store, I fell into a job proofreading for the Charles Merrill Company, a publisher of textbooks, where I wrote and edited spelling and math books (story problems!) for 3 years. I also did a lot of freelance editing for various Columbus organizations and worked as a temporary secretary, a career that came to an end when I got fired for not wearing high-heeled shoes. After that strange experience, I decided that I would never again work for anyone else but myself.

During this time I met my husband. He was renting an apartment from my college roomate’s boyfriend, Steve, and I knew that he liked motorcycles. I wanted to learn to ride, so I bought a little 350 Ducati and asked him if he would teach me how to shift gears. He taught me to ride and we married and I moved to Indianapolis. There I did freelance editing and our daughter was born.

I couldn’t sleep while I was pregnant, so I started work on a murder mystery. My friend Ellen was a mystery expert. One day she suggested that I write a murder mystery and told me some of the things that make a good one. I spent the next two years writing it in odd moments—like 2 a.m. It was about a very depressed woman police officer who solves the murder of an elderly lady in a small town. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t really good enough to publish. I sent letter out to 90 agents. Only 3 of those agents actually read the whole thing. When the manuscript was stolen by an angry secretary (she had been fired and just cleaned out her desk, including my book), I decided it was time to do something different.

Shortly after our daughter was born, my husband took a job in Dayton, Ohio at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. I didn’t know anybody in town, I suddenly didn’t have a job and there I was, stuck in a new town and a new house, with a new baby. Panic! But my motto has always been: "When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping." I went out and explored Dayton and made notes along the way about what I liked and what was special. A couple of years later, I met Geny, an Air Force wife, at a Friends of the Library book sale. We became friends and because she was new in town, she was always asking me things like, "Where can I get the cat groomed?" "Where can we take out-of-town visitors?" I always seemed to know the answers and one day she said to me, "You know everything about Dayton. Why don’t you write a book?" So I did.

The result was The Wright Stuff: A Guide to Life in the Dayton Area, which I published myself in 1989. I started my own vanity press: Kestrel Publications. A kestrel is a parakeet-sized falcon. I chose the name because, like kestrels, I, too, am short, carnivorous, and have a pointy little beak. ["Yes," adds my husband, "And you hang around interstates and eat mice!"]

After a year of promoting The Wright Stuff, the Beavercreek reference librarians asked me, "What are you going to do next?"

"I don’t know," I said, "What book would you like me to write?"

"We need a good book of Ohio ghost stories!" they said. And they told me that the books that get stolen most often from the library are books on ghosts, books on dogs, and books on bartending—an unusual combination. I didn’t know anything about dogs or bartending and I had had some ghostly experiences, so I said, "Sure, I can do that." The result was Haunted Ohio: Ghostly Tales from the Buckeye State, which appeared in 1991. It was followed by Haunted Ohio II (1992), Haunted Ohio III (1994), Spooky Ohio: 13 Traditional Tales (1995) Haunted Ohio IV: Restless Spirits (1997), Ghost Hunter's Guide to Haunted Ohio (2000); and Haunted Ohio V: 200 Years of Ghosts, which I wrote for Ohio's Bicentennial year.

It seems like my readers just can’t get enough of ghost stories. This is why I started the catalog: Invisible Ink: Books on Ghosts & Hauntings, where I sell the books of over 100 other ghostwriters from around the world. My Aunt Joyce sent me an article about a series of catalogs: All Things Jewish, All Things Italian, etc. And I thought, "Why not ‘All Things Ghostly?’" Then a friend sent me a book called Ghosts of Gettysburg, which, she said, you could only get in Pennsylvania. I began to think that there must be lots of other writers, like me, who wrote books about very local ghosts. I started investigating, found that such a catalog had never been done before—and I was in business! You can see the catalog online at www.invink.com.

The catalog gave me the opportunity to start the Invisible Ink Collection at the Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University. I donate a copy of each catalog book, as well as other, older, ghost books. There are now over 1,200 titles in the Collection and each year I send them more books. It’s my way of saying, "Thank you" to a place I love.

I currently live in an unhaunted house near Dayton, Ohio with my husband.   I go out ghost hunting, work on new books, search out new books for the Invisible Ink catalog—and spend a lot of time reading, just like I did when I was in first grade. I knew then that I wanted to be a writer—and here I am.

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