Martha Gilstrap’s life is filled with stories: the ones she reads, the ones she writes, and the ones she lives. Her family’s oral tradition claims descent from the legendary Leif Erickson, a tale of which she is inordinately proud, although her mother always wondered why she’d claim “that old pirate.”
She’s ridden motorcycles, earned a black belt in RyuTe® Karate, owned her own dojo, trained on the grounds of an Okinawan castle destroyed in WWII, and edited and published an international karate newsletter. She’s taught Latin to grade-school children, worn a bite sleeve for a Rottweiler “attack,” got thrown by a horse twice within five minutes, and spent New Year’s Eve on the Puerta del Sol in Madrid.
A midwesterner for most of her life, Martha now lives in the Kansas City area, with a psycho cat and a rescue dog driven 1000 miles to her in one day by lovely people to give the pup a home. Her biggest adventure, however, was bearing and raising a bright, beautiful daughter, now grown.
