Member Profile

CCW Member Profile –  Rachel Goss

“While the Boys Were Away”

by Michelle Smith

Rachel Goss’s favorite fiction offers an escape into another world. Ideally, that world is a historical one “inhabited by bright and capable people having some adventures, where I’m learning something new,” she says. A fan of adventure fiction with intriguing characters and scientific elements set in the mid-20th century, Rachel wrote a story of her own. “I wanted to write a story located in my hometown about a real historical event…. I visited Camp Robinson, the Arkansas National Guard headquarters located near my house, and stumbled upon a small museum dedicated to the time when it was a WWII POW camp. I knew I’d found my subject.”

Rachel’s hometown of North Little Rock had been headquarters for a system of WWII POW camps located in remote agricultural areas throughout Arkansas. Memoirs of German soldiers captured in North Africa, newspaper articles, and International Red Cross camp inspection documentation provided details for the setting of what would be her first novel, Driven by Conscience.

“When a box of WWII era family letters surfaced, written when my dad and his two brothers were in the Army, I wondered what was happening at home while the boys were away. The perspectives of the letters, written from battlefields in the South Pacific, a field hospital in France, and surgical training at a U.S. military base made personal the global nature of that war.”

Rachel earned an A.B. with dual majors in English Literature and Biology from Washington University, St. Louis, as well as an M.S. in Biology from Texas A&M University. She published her first scientific article in 1979 as a college undergraduate, and she worked as an electron microscopist in university biological research laboratories across the nation.

As a follow-up to Driven by Conscience, published in 2019, Rachel wrote additional stories that followed her characters’ lives. “I wanted to know what the future held for them,” she says. Calling upon her experiences in her 20s, she relied upon her time spent living on the grounds of McDonald Observatory in remote west Texas to inform the setting of On Madera Creek, the second novel in her SHE (Science, History, and Espionage) series, published in 2023 and winner of the 2023 Maincrest Media Adventure Fiction prize.

A CCW member since July 2023, Rachel appreciates our interesting and topical speakers. She hopes to write at least one more novel for her series, to be set in California, and she offers the following advice to fellow writers: “Keep trying. Keep rewriting. Seek competent editorial help. Take joy in creating quality original work.”

Rachel’s website is www.rachelagoss.com.