No Turning Back (From Manhattan's Concrete Canyons to Colorado's Soaring Peaks)....Coming Soon!

No Turning Back: From Manhattan's Concrete Canyon's to Colorado's Soaring Peaks is a suspenseful story-memoir about the life of a woman and painter who leaves the concrete canyons of New York to pioneer the last mountain frontiers of Colorado. She’s an artist with such an extraordinary eye for color, form, and detail that her book reads like a painting itself.

Frances Dodd, one of the first women to be elected into the prestigious Salmagundi Art Club in Manhattan in the 1950s, writes her life in a wave-like rhythm, cradling us in the swells, crests, and falls as she emerges from an alcoholic and abusive husband, a misogynistic workplace in the high-rises of NY in the 1960s and 70s, and a love affair with her boss during a racially tense time. Through it, she composes herself and paintings as she forges a new path, traveling West to build a cabin in remote Colorado where her landscapes paintings will transform from Central Park scenes to Colorado’s majestic mountains. She’ll quickly learn that Colorado can be as cold as the hardship she left, but that new friends and community will help her survive. Without running water, electricity, and communication, Fran’s talent for people and painting will prove to be her greatest survival gear.

Dodd’s life is filled with great love, grief and shocking tragic deaths, but she shares her tale without self-pity, remorse, or even a thought of turning back. Rather than losing herself to mounting hopelessness or a sense of failure found in Colorado’s isolating winters, she writes and paints with a tenacious and loving spirit that lifts us up and reminds us that our dreams are worth every difficult mountain, waiting to be climbed.