Have you ever been fascinated, as a child, how applying those seemingly unconnected colors of a Paint By Numbers kit somehow produce a realistic picture? I was. Or later, as an adult, how those pixel- like dots of Monet yield such beauty when you step away? Beauty pulled from the inside out.

Conversely, working with burning pen on wood, a picture is developed from the outside in. And sanding sharp edges of oak wood uncovers the curves of tree development; good years and bad…its development. Beauty revealed from the outside in.

I enjoyed all that during my adult years, juggling life as wife, mother, elementary school teacher, lover and keeper of a “zoo” full of animals, and planter of cuttings that would someday grace my small acre of property in upstate New York.

Life was good, but I did not consider writing though I loved reading historical fiction with Michener’s works as favorites. In college I majored in English, but my grades there were mediocre. I could not see, without help, the hidden details and nuances in poetry I admired. But once I wrote in a freshman creative writing class something even my professor thought good. Just an image, and you can laugh over it, but then I was so proud: “The sun sat on the sea like an orange on aluminum foil.”

A spark was lit. I can paint a picture with words.

But nothing became of that until 50 years later when I shared extensive written “letters” with a friend. “You are a writer,” he said, this highly educated man of many years. “And a damned good one, too. You can make even the most ordinary interesting. You must write. Write!”

More on a dare than anything else, I wrote, The Balance of Wings. It was so much fun creating this fantasy world I knew, from experience, that young readers would enjoy! And so I entered the ups and downs of the world of a self-published author…and I was hooked.

After retirement, stories came to mind that I knew I could tell. I could give life back to people, long dead, who made a difference. I could resurrect times and places my readers could immerse themselves in. And I could create characters of my own… and there is such power in that… sculpting who they are, how they live and, sadly, how they die. The research was fascinating! The production of a book like a birthing!

Niglíču - She Comes Out Alive: A Story of Wounded Knee and O’Toole were written almost concurrently though published many months apart. And now, Through Our Own Wrong Eyes has entered the stream waiting to find its niche among you, the readers, who enjoy uncovering the past by looking from the inside out, and the outside in.