Matt Coleman

‘A Rocky Divorce’

Matt Coleman, who lives in Texarkana, says he wanted to write from the time he was 16.

“I had a teacher who inspired me to write, who was the first one to tell me I was good at it, and when you’re 16, anybody telling you you’re good at anything fuels you,” he remembers. “It also set me on a path to become an educator. I didn’t anticipate that; I kind of stumbled into it. But I came from a family of educators, so it was sort of predestined.”

Coleman has been in education for 17 years, and it was during a post-graduate class that he started an essay about his first year teaching and thought, “Hey, this could turn in to something.” He threw in a little mystery — something he’d always been drawn to as a reader — and his first book, “Juggling Kittens,” was born. “I took the memoir side of things, and the humorous side, and inserted a mystery into it, and when I was finished, I thought it was something I’d pick up and read,” he says with a laugh.

The seed for “A Rocky Divorce” also came from real life — the experiences his wife went through when her first marriage ended.

“Rocky is recently divorced, very anti-socialite, bubbly and witty and fun and likes to have a drink and have a good time,” Coleman describes. “She’s pretty snarky, but she also has a Sherlockian sense of observation and is able to suss out mysteries. After her divorce, her cousin, the Watson to her Sherlock, talks her into joining the Junior League. She’s poking fun at it all, but her cousin wants her to look into string of home invasion robberies — because if she solves it, they’ll be Junior League superstars.

“It’s been the most nerve-wracking experience of my life,” he says of publishing “A Rocky Divorce.” “It’s out there, and people are reading it who are the basis for characters in the book. I’m always waiting on who I’m going to run into at the grocery store!”

Meanwhile, Coleman is working on a followup to “Juggling Kittens.”