About the Author

Michal woke up one morning about a year ago not knowing whether she'd been dreaming or if someone was there talking to her, saying, "Michal, tell the stories." She argued, "I've been telling the stories these past eight years. What are you talking about?" She was referring to the fact that, as she neared the age of sixty, she'd begun getting up early in the morning to write fiction. She'd written stories about Jill, a hospice nurse, because she'd worked as a hospice social worker for many years. She had written another fictitious work about Mamie, a middle aged run-away, with whom she identified during her fifties when she was overworked, with five children mostly grown, yet still feeling under-appreciated. Also there was a collection of more than one-hundred short stories by then. Michal had been raised to believe that women, especially poor women, were not supposed to have a voice, but one was screaming at her now. Now she understood that it was time to let others see them, too. To let them see the light of day. Before she went to sleep that night, she thought about her school days. The first time she realized real people could die was in the second grade. She knew people died in war, in history, and in Bible stories. But no one that she knew of had died, until a boy in the front row of her class didn't come to school one day. The teacher was all hush-hush and announced that the family was going to live with an Aunt because the boy's father had been killed by a pole full of electricity. "Fried like an egg," her irreverent uncle said as her family sat around the supper table that night. She already had lots of fears. Now she could add electricity to the bunch. She pulled out many of the things she had written over the last ten years, reedited them, and found she had enough material for five more books and four sets of short stories. That, as well as being given a stage IV cancer diagnosis, was enough to finally spur Michal on. There is something good about seeing the end in sight. It gives a person freedom. The first book Michal published came from the viewpoint of an elderly lady. It felt right. They weren't her stories, but her stories, even though they had a little information about her childhood on a farm within them. The chapters unfolded one after another. In six weeks she was done. She finally learned the name of this older woman whose voice was strong enough to convince her to publish. "Her name was Mrs. Smetzal, "Michal says, "and I thank her."