Randell Jones
Daniel Boone Footsteps
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6-minute Stories

Everybody loves a good story
Listen to these 6-minute stories
from both new voices and experienced writers
from the Personal Story Publishing Project anthologies:
Bearing Up , Exploring , That Southern Thing , Luck & Opportunity,
Trouble , Curious Stuff , Twists and Turns , Sooner or Later , and Now or Never.
Copies of all 10 books in the series available here.
“6-minute Stories” episodes announced on Facebook @6minutestories

"Space: The Final Frontier" by Marie Mitchell

 – to board the Starfleet’s Enterprise

After applying decades ago to NASA to be the first journalist in space, this Trekkie later trained for a mission to Mars—sort of.

 

Marie Mitchell’s 30-years as a broadcast journalist, plus 15-years teaching communication classes at Eastern Kentucky University, have provided plenty of material for her newspaper columns, short stories, plays and Kentucky-based books for kids and adults. She thrives on writing collaboratively with her husband, Mason Smith, or her sister, Rebecca Mitchell Turney.  Marie has joined four other EKU professors in writing novels under the penname Quinn MacHollister. All books are available on Amazon. Marie also shares her research on EKU’s first woman President, Mary Creegan Roark, through the Kentucky Humanities Council’s Speaker’s Bureau.

Author’s Talk 

Marie Mitchell

Marie Mitchell

Writing “Space: The Final Frontier”

As an impressionable child, I remember being fascinated by the sci-fi series, Star Trek, in the ’60s. I wanted to explore the final frontier with the intrepid crew of the USS Enterprise. I fanaticized about seeking out new life and new civilizations alongside Captain Kirk, Mister Spock and Dr. McCoy, and boldly going where no one had gone before. 

I imagined encountering alien cultures like the peaceful Vulcans, the warrior-class Klingons and the muscular lizard-like Gorn. I yearned to have my molecules scrambled in the transporter as I beamed down to a mysterious planet to investigate anomalies that were detected by our scanners. I vowed never to wear a red shirt on such away missions since those crew members tended to be zapped into oblivion by whatever hostile entity inhabited the planet. 

Over the years I’ve followed each Star Trek spin-off, from Next Generation to Discovery—plus all the movies. I’ve been captivated by the issues raised in the various shows –Starfleet’s protocol for First Contact with an alien race, the ethics of time travel, and the criteria for recognizing an Artificial Intelligence as sentient and therefore able to make decisions for itself. 

To this day I remain curious about what might be living and thriving just beyond our solar system and how we could communicate with those beings. 

It’s unlikely that I’ll ever meet an actual alien myself, unless they’re cleverly disguised and already blending in among us Earthlings. But, I’ll continue to pursue my space travel dreams—even if it’s only vicariously through the Trek-Verse. As Captain Picard would say: "Engage!" — Marie Mitchell

Randell Jones