About Cynthia

Cynthia Robertson is the founder of the Arizona Novel Writers’ Workshop; a cooperative workshop dedicated to helping writers write and polish their novels, and to getting them published.

The ANWW is kept deliberately small to insure the quality of both the participants and the help they receive from the other writers. The ANWW maintains a waiting list for those interested in participating.

Cynthia has written a monthly newspaper column, Lucid Moments, and has had her short story Peanut Butter Kisses published in a literary journal. Cynthia writes internet ad copy and has worked in creative marketing for the past eight years. She has recently completed her novel Sword of Mordrey, an historical adventure set amid the sun-baked alleyways of ancient Jerusalem and the squalor and color of medieval London.

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I owe  a lot of my love of books to my big sister. During those long, hot summers of my California childhood she would often take me to our small town’s library. Partly subterranean, shadowy and at least 10 degrees cooler than the hot sidewalks outside its brow-level windows, the children’s section offered a delicious, book-scented retreat from a sizzling July afternoon. Big sis would get me started, pointing out some favorites of hers and telling me about them in a hushed ‘library’ voice. Then she would climb the stairs to the ‘adult’ level and leave me to it.

However long she left me there, I always wanted to stay longer. With the children’s librarian watching over me from behind her massive desk and horn-rimmed glasses, I would browse the shelves.

Some favorites I recall with a fondness usually reserved for beloved family members are:

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle

The Egypt Game, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by the incomparable C.S. Lewis

Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Island of the Blue Dolphins, by Scott O’Dell

And of course, when I was a little older,  The Outsiders, by S. E. Hinton. (I can clearly recall being a little in love with Ponyboy.)

This early love of books led to my desire to tell stories. I longed, at an early age, to craft the sort of tales a person would lose themselves in; to create other worlds and people wholly believable, and to inspire that feeling I got when I closed the cover for the final time on a really good read – that the characters who inhabited its pages would be missed.

                                   Best Wishes,

                                   Cynthia Robertson