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24 | Four Seasons Hemet Herald | August 2018 | Vicki and her husband, Jim Hitt, moved to Hemet in July 2006. Before that, she taught history, psychology and sociology for 25 years in Simi Valley. She graduated from California Lutheran University with a Masters in Marriage and Family Therapy and became a licensed MFT in California. She used art therapy to help her to understand better the interworking of her patients, especially children. After retiring, she returned to college to study art. She works in all mediums, although primarily in pastels and acrylics. She enjoys photography and uses many of her photos as references for paintings. She is also an active member of the Diamond Valley Writers' Guild. For the last eight years, she has provided the covers for Straitjackets Magazine. She chairs the Four Season Book Club, is past chairperson of the Art League, member of the New Media Art Group. Her husband and she have two critique writing groups in their home. Jim Hitt is a graduate of North Texas State University. He taught English for over 40 years in high school and community college. In addition to numerous magazine articles, he is also the author of The American West: From Fiction Into Film (McFarland, 1991), which has been called the definitive monograph on the subject. Words and Shadows (Citadel, 1992), a large format book, examined the connection between mainstream American literature and film. He is also included in The Louis L'amour Companion. His fiction includes short stories and novels. In 2001, Adventure Books published his novel The Last Warrior, a story based on the life of Luther Sage Kelly, an actual American frontiersman. Carny: A Novel in Stories, follows a circus as it travels the back roads of Southern California in 1948. It won the 2011 Grand Prize for Fiction from Next Generation Indie Book Awards. These are stories of carny people and their world that, taken together, form a novel with a distinct beginning and end. "It's not a traditional tale of cowboys and Indians," Mr. Hitt said. "Rather it's set in a more modern West, although one still separated from us by close to 60 years. One of the stories in the book, The Boy With Too Much Hair was named by Once Written as the best fantasy short story of 2009. "My stepmother was a carny person." Mr. Hitt said. "In the summers of 1957 and 58, when I was a teenager, she took me along for a few weeks. I got to know some of these people and fell in love with them and the carny." His next book was The Courage of Others (Open Books, 2016), a novel set in Texas in 1919. The story is narrated by a teenage white boy who becomes embroiled in racial tensions of the period. One reviewer praised the book as 'a cross between My Antonia and To Kill a Mockingbird." In August Jim's latest novel, Bodie, will be published by Black Horse Press. A prequel, Bodie A Western Part I, is now available as an e-book on Amazon. At present Jim is working on two novels as well as dabbling in Photoshop and other related programs. The July/August Art Gallery will feature art and photography by Jim and his wife Vicki Allen-Hitt. ~ Nancy Hawkins A R T Group

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