KNOWING YOURSELF THROUGH FICTION

This isn’t a newsletter, it’s a place.

Welcome to Echo Canyon.

Image Inspired by Author, Created by ChatGPT

A neighborhood where five women in their 60s and 70s are refusing to let their best years be behind them. Come pull up a chair. You’ve been expected.

When the chapter ends, most readers leave. You don’t have to.

This Isn’t a Newsletter. It’s a Place.

You’re entering a place where women like you are seen, and where the stories begin to feel like your own.

Five women. One canyon. Real lives, fully lived. You’ll see yourself in one of them the moment you meet her. Riley, Raven, Quinn, Skylar, and Val. Five women who refused to disappear.

And if you’re like most readers, you won’t want to leave.

A reader wrote,

Thanks so much for your encouragement Marylee. I’ve read some of your “Echo Canyon” chapters and your words have touched me deeply.

When you talk about their dreams I really identify. There is quiet strength and clear resolve, yet hidden vulnerability lurking within. ~ Chris Craft

That’s the point of Story Insiders.

Not more content.

Not extras.

Just not having to leave them.

Choose Your Chair

FREE READERS are invited to the Front Porch

Image Inspired by Author, Created by ChatGPT

Come in. Stay as long as you want. No charge. The perfect place to get to know these women… and maybe yourself, too.

This is where you meet them.

Story Insiders is where you stay.

Free subscribers receive:

✓ Doses of Fiction - scenes from the women’s stories I’m currently writing.

✓ Life’s Threads — reflections that connect their stories to yours

✓ First chapters of Whispers of Echo Canyon — free to read now

FOR STORY INSIDERS

— The Veranda is in the back

Image Created by Marylee in Canva

Not everyone comes back here. But you are welcome. Most readers leave at the end of chapter. You won’t have to. You'll see the full view of Echo Canyon and stay with the women. Your new friends.

Paid Subscribers, aka STORY INSIDERS, receive everything a free reader receives, plus:

📖 Read Mirage of Trust in real time. Weekly chapter drafts, months before publication.

📓 The 2 AM thoughts. Private journals from Riley, Raven, Quinn, Val, and Skylar, the interior moments that keeps you at the table with them.

🪞 Deeper Life’s Threads reflections. What shifts when the women finally choose what they want, and where you recognize your own decisions and desires.

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Photography by Marylee, Designed in Canva

I’m Marylee Pangman, 73, and I published my debut novel in February 2026.

Before fiction, I spent 30 years as a desert container gardening expert in Tucson, Arizona. I founded The Contained Gardener in 1998, built it into a business that people in my community still talk about, and sold it in 2012. I published two books on desert container gardening. And then fiction came along like a loud knock at the door.

I write about women in their sixties and seventies who are not done yet. And, you know what? I'm not done yet either.

Baby Boomer women are not often given center stage. I decided to change that.

I’ve planned a five-book series. One book for each woman named above.

Echo Canyon is the neighborhood I built for the women I wish existed in real life and for the readers who have been waiting to find themselves in a story.

I also write The Potted View on Substack. A desert container gardening newsletter I’ve published since 1998. Some of my readers have been with me for almost 30 years. Those women are the reason I knew this audience existed before I wrote the first word.

Welcome. Your chair is waiting for you on the veranda.

Image by Marylee in Canva

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Whispers of Echo Canyon — Book 1 of the Women of the Canyon Series

At 73, Marylee Pangman published her debut novel. In a near-future desert community on the western edge of possibility, five women find each other at the moment life asks them to begin again. This is the book women in their 60s and 70s have been waiting for.

What Reviewers Are Saying

“A book is a gift you can open again and again, and it creates the same magic. — Garrison Keillor. So it is with Marylee Pangman’s book. Her book is beautiful... I could not put this book down. This book is charged with magic and myth.”

~ Connie, United States ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“Brilliant. Just brilliant. Marylee Pangman has a delightful turn of phrase... I feel like I am part of this canyon now, and want to know more about how my own story unfolds within it.”

~ Jane, United Kingdom ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“There’s no putting this one down... I stayed with the women of Echo Canyon longer and longer, savoring the easy yet vibrant dialogue and sensual descriptions of gardens, landscape, and relationships. The canyon awaits your second book, Marylee, and so do I.”

~ Jeri, United States ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐