Shelley Fraser Mickle grew up in Arkansas and Tennessee and graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1966. She studied writing at the University of Mississippi, the Harvard Extension School, and Wellesley College. She lives in Alachua County, Florida, with her three horses, Skip, Mullet, and Precious, and her dog, Stella. She is married and the mother of two children.

For five years, Shelley Fraser Mickle has been a regular commentator for Mid-Florida Public Radio, reading humorous essays. Some of these have been used as a fund-raising tape and were also given a Special Achievement Award by Associated Press in 1997. These essays now frequently are heard state-wide on Public Radio's Capital Report, broadcast out of Tallahassee, and she has been the guest commentator for the University of Florida football team for the last two years, prior to the Sugar Bowl and the F.S.U vs. U.F. game.

Her humorous essays have also recently become a part of the public radio program Recess, which is being picked up from satellite in radio stations in twenty listening areas ranging from Jacksonville to Columbus, Albuquerque to Milwaukee, Mobile Alabama, parts Texas and the state of Wyoming.

In August, 2000 she began reading her humorous essays on NPR's "Morning Edition".

from The Gainesville Sun, Oct. 1995

MEMORIES OF HALLOWEEN
By Shelley Fraser Mickle

In the little cotton town of McCrory, Ark., where I grew up, Halloween got more attention than even Christmas.

We were fewer than 2,000 people with one movie theater, one paved road, about 15 churches, and miles and miles of cotton fields. Every inch of dirt was squeezed to raise cotton, even to being planted right up to some folks' front porches.

I remember seeing kids sitting on their steps dangling their feet a few inches from those prickly boils bursting with the white fiber. Toward the end of September when the roll was called at school, at least a third of my class was missing when their parents kept them home to pick the crop.

I was a town kid, so I was not a part of this school vacation, which I resented until one year when I picked my own sack of cotton - just to see what it was like -and decided that going to school was less of a misery.

With Halloween coming right at the end of the cotton-picking season, I guess it could be said that people went just hog wild. On the morning after Halloween night, we'd wake up to find store windows on Main Street soaped and yard chairs moved from one backyard to another clear across town.

A brassiere flew from the high school flag pole more than once. And one year an outhouse near my grandmother's house, which she'd been dying to have removed, was sitting in the middle of Main Street. I remember her telling how much embarrassment that caused her, since she had been pestering the newspaper editor, who owned the outhouse, to have it moved. He thought she had it put in the middle of Main Street to peeve him.

In the fall of 1950, a town committee decided we should have a Halloween King and Queen contest to cut down on the mischief. It was a twist on Trick or Treat. Each candidate would sell treats and each penny would count as one vote. The couple who raised the most money would be crowned at a school dance that would get everybody off the streets.

It was my good fortune to be nominated with Richard Key as the candidates from the first grade. He was not only cute, he could make a yo yo do Around the World and Walk the Dog. I was pumped for my contest with him when one morning I woke up with a mystery virus that in a few hours got named Polio. I was whisked to Memphis to spend the next three months in an isolation hospital. I also ended up missing the rest of the first grade, which has become a handy excuse for why I can't spell.

But when I entered the second grade with the rest of my class, Richard and I were once again nominated for the Halloween King and Queen, since everybody felt kind of bad that I hadn't gotten my first chance at a coronation. It never did dawn on me that I could win the whole shebang just on the pitiful factor. Probably everyone felt so guilty that he or she had escaped having the devil germ breathed on them that I could have been voted Queen of Anything for the rest of the century.

Sure enough, Richard and I won that year and every other year we felt like it. It never entered my mind that there was any physical difference to me at all until one day, after admiring an organ grinder I'd seen in Memphis, I stood out on my little cotton-town Main Street with a toy music box and a stuffed monkey on my shoulder. So many people put money in my cup that I could have paid my family's light bill for years.

My mother pointed out to me that I was getting rich not for my music-grinding ability but because of the steel braces that looked just like the ones on all those poster children who raised money, too. The one thing I resented most was that I had to give up the best way I'd ever found to get rich quick.

Thirty years later, I began weaving the psychic spinoff of all these little stories into one big one when I began writing my first novel, "The Queen of October." After it was published, I was asked to come back to my little cotton town for a book signing, and I had to laugh when the committee there told me it was a way for them to raise money for the town's centennial.

I was sitting at a desk in the school library signing books to beat the band when a woman very quietly sat down beside me and put a sack in my lap. "You can't fool me," she said. "I know who the real King of October in your book is."

I didn't recognize her at first. It was Mrs. Key, Richard's mother. And in the sack was the picture of Richard and me with the school principal mashing a glittery cardboard crown onto my head. Underneath my satiny long "Gone With The Wind" gown is the slight glint of my good-for-quick-money braces. "Where is Richard? I asked, assuming that he, too, would be over 40 and maybe unrecognizable.

"He died," she told me quietly. "A cerebral hemorrhage. He was 27." And then she thanked me. She believed that in the fictional form as the King in my book he would live on. I didn't want to tell her that all my characters are a composite of real folks dipped into a heavy sauce of imagination.

So much of my own personal growth has sprouted from the holiday of Halloween that I could probably say I have harvested from it my writing style of blending sorrow with humor. I know that after I had my own children, it became a night when I could barely contain myself. Like the time when I put . . . oh well, that's another story.