In 2006, Dianna Hutts Aston found herself at a crossroads. A decade living as a June Cleaver type, “vacuuming in her pearls and heels,” as she described it, had dug her into a hole. The walls began to cave in on her, so Aston got down on her knees and spoke to God.
“Please let me live a life of service,” she prayed. “Let my work be meaningful, whatever it’s going to be. [Let me] be able to take care of my family financially, and always, please let it be fun.”
She described the next phase of her life as “magic,” kicked off by her prayer. Guided by what she calls a persistent “tug,” Aston moved across borders, careers and identities, turning the small details inside an extraordinary life into popular children’s books grounded in science and humanity. Now, after years of following that instinct, the pull has brought her back to the Coastal Bend.
“A lot of things started in Port A,” she said. She spent summers growing up visiting Port Aransas beaches, combing for shells and looking for mermaids. Living in landlocked Buda, she’d spend the drive home in tears, feeling the soft, subtle tugging toward the sea that would accompany her for the rest of her life.
Aston found escape within the paperbacks her parents read, consumption eventually turning into creation. With a journalism degree from the University of Houston, she became a columnist, reporter and even an editor of Central Texas weeklies in the years post-graduation. After covering a particularly gruesome accident involving high school students, she stepped away from journalism and focused on raising her two children, James and Lizzy. Through births and bedtime stories, she rediscovered her love for picture books and found a new creative outlet.
“When I had my son James in 1990, I looked in his eyes, and I swear he was looking at me back,” she remembered. “I realized I had known him forever. It was a moment of looking into eternity.” This moment she would go on to immortalize forever in her second book, When You Were Born — but it would take another decade before it reached print.
“For years, I had tried to write it,” she explained. “I got two library cards and checked out 40 picture books a week. I joined different writers’ organizations and went to conferences. Finally, I took a writing class with my now friend Kathy, and after taking her class, I knew what to do.”
Four books into her children’s literature career, she followed her instinct to San Miguel de Allende, known as one of Mexico’s magical pueblos before receiving its internationally renowned title of a World Heritage Site in 2008. The people she met, the projects she pursued and the nature she studied here would fuel the next decade of her award-winning work, but marked only the beginning of her adventurous midlife rebirth.
“My forties were the greatest,” she said. After hearing about her journeys, it was hard to disagree.
She spent seven years in San Miguel, taking disadvantaged children on hot-air balloon rides for The Oz Project. She explored rural Mexico, uncovering purple ladybugs, walking paths lined with blue morning glories and finding meaning in yellow swallowtail butterflies. She rode 35,000 miles on the back of her boyfriend’s Kawasaki across Mexico and the American Southwest. Eventually, she let her heart take her back to her friends in Port Aransas.
Back on the Texas coast, the pull that once sent Aston across countries and into the sky has settled into something steadier. It lives in her writing now, taking inspiration from the ocean breeze, seashells and the same small, magical moments that continue to define her life. The adventures may have slowed, but the magic hasn’t, and after years of following it everywhere else, Aston has followed it back where it all started.
Contact: diannahuttsaston.org | @diannaaston
