Richard Little’s experience as a writer began when he took a chance on a week-long workshop in the Rockies. In Ouray, Colorado, much-published author Dani Shapiro offered her participants insight, bits of wisdom, and practical lessons in what writers do. Moreover, she told Richard he wrote well, and had something to say.

Richard’s childhood years were spent in a suburb of Sacramento, near the American River. It turned out that was scant preparation for the University of California at Berkeley and campus unrest in the Sixties. Hastings Law School in San Francisco came next, and he passed the bar exam in 1968, a year that saw two assassinations, riots at the Democratic political convention in Chicago, the election of Richard Nixon, and the largest build-up of the war in Vietnam. A high point, however, was when, briefly living in Washington, DC, Richard was privileged to be sworn in as a new attorney by Justice William O. Douglas.

Richard enlisted in the Navy JAG Corps and tried courts-martial in Norfolk, Virginia. Four years later, he returned to California and opened a law office on the Monterey Peninsula.

Meanwhile, the nation’s capital beckoned. He moved back to Washington where he served as counsel to a House of Representatives committee before taking a job in President Jimmy Carter’s administration as part of his Congressional liaison team. Meetings at the White House were customary (along with a driver to Capitol Hill), and there was even a one-on-one brief encounter with the President himself walking down an empty hallway. He also had a memorable telephone conversation with Barry Goldwater … all pretty heady stuff for a young “Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce.”

Richard’s bout of what he terms “Potomac Fever” finally broke, and Ronald Reagan was on the horizon after Jimmy Carter’s fraught one term of office. It was time to move back west. A lifelong friend had settled in a place called Bellingham, Washington and offered to share a law office.

After another bar exam (his second), he ultimately accepted an offer to join the Bellingham City Attorney’s office. He spent twelve years there, then took advantage of a mayor’s idea to create a city Government Relations position, i.e., lobbyist. For thirteen years Richard worked the hallowed halls of Olympia and Washington, DC.

Thus, out came a novel about that experience and small-town lawyering. The encouragement of the seminar years before in Colorado bore fruit in City Haul and in two collections of stories about road trip travels. He has had pieces published in newspapers and journals as well as in two anthologies by the excellent writers’ collective, Red Wheelbarrow Writers, So Much Depends Upon … and Uncommon Solitude, the latter composed during our persistent Covid pandemic.

Still Writing, as Dani Shapiro’s book is titled.

To purchase any titles from the shop, email: dlittle07@gmail.com