The family that creates together

The laptop doesn’t come out until most of the day's work is already done. Tanishia Womack has put in her hours as a paralegal. Her sons, Michael and Gabriel, have made it through school and whatever else the day demanded. Mixed in somewhere is law school, where their mother is working toward another goal.

But sometimes, this is when the Womacks' other work begins. They call it “circle time.”

The family gathers around, tosses out ideas and laughs about just how far they can take the latest adventure. Occasionally, mom has to remind her young co-authors that an idea might be a little much for a children's book and perhaps ought to be saved for later. Mostly, though, she listens.

“I almost kind of want to compare it to our quiet time together,” Womack said. “We can kind of shut out the world and just focus on this project that we’re working on together.”

Somewhere along the way, a mother and her two boys became a family of published authors.

Readers will have a chance to meet the Womacks as part of the Southern New Mexico Book Festival, where the family's books will be among those represented. But the story of how Tanishia, 11-year-old Michael and 9-year-old Gabriel wound up there begins less like a publishing venture than a kid doing what kids do.

Gabriel liked making things up. He could turn almost anything into a story. One day, inspiration came from a toy with a toucan on it. Gabriel started creating characters and telling funny stories about them, and his mother began to wonder whether there might be something more to all that imagination.

“I was like, ‘Gabriel, those could really be books,’” she said.

Gabriel's initial reaction was essentially: Sure, that sounds cool. Then Tanishia brought out the laptop. Every night, after work and the family's other activities were finished, the two would sit together and talk their way through the story. An idea became a character. The character needed somewhere to go. Something had to happen. Eventually, all that talking and imagining became words on a page and Michael noticed.

“Oh, well, I want to write a story too,” Tanishia remembers him saying.

So, they made room at the laptop for another budding writer. The result is a pair of young authors with their own budding mystery series. Gabriel created Detective Pecan and the Case of the Missing Banana, while Michael wrote Ted E. Solvit and the Case of the Missing Tiger's Eye Diamond. Illustrator Franco E. Caro helped turn the boys' imagined characters into the ones they now see on the pages.

There is even a family disagreement over how one of those characters should be pronounced. Tanishia says “pecan” one way. Gabriel and his father say it another. The detective, apparently, isn't talking.

The boys aren't the only published authors in the house. Tanishia wrote Hired on Purpose, a career guide that grew out of something she hadn't necessarily recognized as a particular talent until other people kept asking her for help.

A paralegal for about five years, she has also taken on projects helping startup law firms organize documents and establish processes. Along the way, she found herself helping people with resumes, job searches and career advancement. Eventually, rather than having the same conversation over and over, she had another idea.

“I'm just going to write a book and then you can just buy the book,” she recalled.

Hired on Purpose walks readers through those subjects and includes a companion guide designed to be worked through alongside the book.

Writing, it turns out, has always been part of Tanishia's life, even if “author” wasn't always part of how she described herself. She enjoyed creative writing in school and thrived on writing through her undergraduate and master's work. Now she is a student at Vermont Law and Graduate School, completing most of her law studies remotely.

“I honestly never thought it would be something that we would get into as far as becoming authors,” she said.

Perhaps that's part of what makes the family's newest pursuit work. There wasn't a grand plan to create a family publishing enterprise. There was a boy with a toucan, a mother who recognized a story and another boy who decided he had a story of his own. And there was time together.

The Womack family found in Alamogordo a place where there is more of that. Tanishia grew up partly in Texas and Florida in a military family, then met her husband, Michael Sr., in Tampa while he was on active duty. Holloman Air Force Base became his final duty station, and after arriving in Southern New Mexico, the family decided it didn't want to leave.

They had had enough of the bigger-city pace. Alamogordo felt smaller, comfortable and right for raising their children.

“This was cozy and perfect for us,” she said. “So, we were like, OK, let's stay here. This is home now.”

There was another kind of stability the family wanted, too. Michael Sr. once envisioned a 30-year military career. As he approached 20 years, however, he began thinking about everything that deployments and military life had required him to miss. The boys were still young.

“This is like the perfect time for me to really live life with them,” Tanishia recalled of his decision.

Michael, the older of the two boys, remembers enough of those years to appreciate the difference. His father now works from home, as does his mother, and Michael has told her he likes knowing both parents are there. There are no more moves to anticipate and no deployments taking dad away.

Into that more settled family life came something nobody particularly planned: books.

The first books may not be the last. Both boys' stories are intended to become series, and Tanishia hopes they can produce another installment, although she has discovered that law school isn't particularly respectful of publishing schedules.

The family is also beginning to venture into book festivals, starting close to home in New Mexico. They've even created plush versions of the boys' characters. All of that sounds increasingly like a small family business. But Tanishia doesn't really talk about it that way.

Of course they would like people to buy the books. They'd like readers to discover Detective Pecan and Ted E. Solvit and follow them into whatever mysteries Gabriel and Michael dream up next. But sales aren't the part she talks about most.

“This is kind of like our hobby with the kids,” she said. “This is the one thing that we can say we do together as a family.”

Law school belongs to mom. The boys have their individual interests. Everyone has places to go and things to do.

The books belong to all of them. And they have given Tanishia a way to show her sons something that is considerably bigger than publishing.

“You're not too young, you're not too little to do what are seemingly big things,” she said. “You can always reach for more.”

For now, that means another mystery, another character and another evening around the laptop. Years from now, Tanishia hopes the books will still be around, not simply as something her sons once wrote, but as evidence of something they once did together.

Maybe they'll keep writing. Maybe they'll explore something completely different.

Perhaps someday, they'll sit down with children of their own, listen to some improbable story about a toy or an animal or a missing piece of fruit and recognize the beginning of something.

Then, maybe they'll pull out a laptop and let the creativity flow.