Greetings
2025 • “A Scandal in Academia: A New England Holiday Tale,” a short-story installment in the Derrick Miles series of Sherlockian-inspired mysteries.
2024 • Christmas Eve on Crooked Road
What profit, in a world without a prophet?
2023 • “The Blue Topaz: A Holiday Tale of Fowl Play,” a short-story installment in the Derrick Miles series of Sherlockian-inspired mysteries.
2022 • Bad Blessings: Poems of the Western Experience
The poems in this collection spring from the “bad blessing” of leaving a beloved homeplace back East—but unexpectedly finding a voice in the West.
2021 • Fourteen
There could be poorer ways to spend a day.
Top three finalist, Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, 2021
2020 • The Wolf Hunt: A Tale of the Texas Badlands (writing as Will Brandon), excerpt published in The Texas Spur, 2020
“The Wolf Hunt runs at the head of the pack as a great read.” —Mike Cox, author of Gunsights and Sites in Texas Ranger History
2019 • Wild and Free on US 83
4/4 time, medium fast ballad, in G
(START WITH CHORUS)
C G Am D G
Wild and free on US 83
C G Am D
In my heart that blue highway calls to me;
C D G Am
North to Canada it goes,
G Am D D7 G C G D7 G
Southward rolls to Mexico.
2018 • Bad Blessings
give thanks, give thanks for
adverse experiences,
contrary events
This was no accident. You strode, steadfast and slow, out of boundary berm onto blacktop, indiscernible against autumn remnants of sprawling screwbean. Your hide undivided from camouflaging brush until brakes were past deploy, you kept coming, deliberate, hoof by hoof, even as wheels swerved. As one with the fatal fender, you met your end. The car would never run again.
 Barbara Brannon (aka Will Brandon), “A Scandal in Academia: A New England Holiday Tale,” Christmas card 2025, cover |  |  Barbara Brannon (aka Will Brandon), “The Blue Topaz: A Holiday Tale of Fowl Play,” Christmas card 2023, cover |  Barbara Brannon, “Fourteen,” Christmas card 2021, front |
|---|---|---|---|
 Barbara Brannon, “Fourteen,” Christmas card 2021, inside |  Barbara Brannon (aka Will Brandon), “The Wolf Hunt” excerpt, Christmas card 2020, page 1 |  Barbara Brannon (aka Will Brandon), “The Wolf Hunt” excerpt, Christmas card 2020, page 2 |  Barbara Brannon, “Wild and Free on U.S. 83,” Christmas card 2019 |
 Barbara Brannon, “Merry Christmas from The Paragraph Ranch,” Christmas card 2014, inside |  Barbara Brannon, “On the Texas Plains Trail,” Christmas card 2013, inside |  Barbara Brannon, “In Canyon Country,” Christmas card 2012, inside |  Barbara Brannon, “How’s the Little Mango This Week?,” Christmas card 2008, inside |
 Barbara Brannon, “Preserving the Season,” Christmas card 2008, cover |  Barbara Brannon, “The Whereabouts of Waldo,” Christmas card 2007, cover |  Barbara Brannon, “Come Home Safe,” Christmas card 2006, inside front |  Barbara Brannon, “Come Home Safe,” Christmas card 2006, inside and music |
 Barbara Brannon, “Come Home Safe,” Christmas card 2006, cover |  Barbara Brannon, “In Holly Shelter,” Christmas card 2005, inside |  Barbara Brannon, “In Holly Shelter,” Christmas card 2005, inside front cover |  Barbara Brannon, “Two Plains Fables,” Christmas card 2011 |
 Barbara Brannon, “Cowboy Santa,” Christmas card 2007, outside |  Barbara Brannon, “Cowboy Santa,” Christmas card 2007, inside |  Barbara Brannon, “Carol of the Nest,” Christmas card 2016 |  Barbara Brannon, “One Light Through Many Windows,” Christmas card 2000 |
 Barbara Brannon, “Moon over Lumina,” outside pages, Christmas card 2002 |  Barbara Brannon, “Moon over Lumina,” Christmas card 2002 |  Barbara Brannon, “Calendar,” Christmas card 2004 |  Barbara Brannon, “In Holly Shelter,” Christmas card 2005, front |
2017 • Cowboy Santa
A few years back, before our new home in Spur was even a sparkle in our eye, I got to know the work of an Amarillo artist named Jack Sorenson. Renowned for his evocative Western scenes, Jack is also famous for a beloved holiday creation: a gift-bearing stranger in black cowboy hat, red duster, and white beard who might or might not be a kid’s notion of Santa.
2016 • Carol of the Nest
For several holiday seasons in Lubbock it’s been our custom to select and cut our own tree from the Double Shovel Christmas Tree Farm down the road in Post, Texas. Tree farms are a rarity here on the dusty West Texas plains. Still, Levi has managed to pick out just the right Afghan pine for us each year — though the tree farm’s forest continues to grow taller, just as he has.
2015 • Mouse Expense
The Hampshire Bookshop of Northampton, Massachusetts, was founded in April, 1916, by Marion Dodd and Mary Byers Smith, graduates of Smith College. It was one of the first “personal bookshops” established in the United States, and also one of the first run by women. The proprietors ran this delightful piece in the “Bookshop News,” column of their Book Scorpion Miscellany, December 1929.
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1997 • One
One of the signal events of 1997 was the appearance of
Comet Hale-Bopp. The heavily phenomenon was visible nightly from my sixth-floor balcony in Macon, Georgia.
ONE
In blazing speed across the night
The comet spreads its tail ——
It makes its way from world to world
Unmarked but for its trail.
Stars belong to galaxies
And planets hug the sun,
But comets travel all alone ——
A universe of one.
1996 • Moving Out
The card for 1996, inspired by an example from a book arts exhibition, was a booklet made from one sheet of paper that folded down into a miniature the size of a postage stamp. It was bound with a cover of heavy decorative paper in a cranberry-and-gold paisley pattern.
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