Young readers can learn their ABCs with adorable little angels in this Precious Moments padded board book with foil-edged pages! Samuel J. Butcher’s delightful drawings are complemented by the simple rhyming text!
My first "book" was a 90-page narrative written in long hand in the loopy cursive of a thirteen-year-old dreamer. I penned a tale of a lost dog that after many misadventures was finally rescued and lived happily ever after. Throughout high school and college my term papers and reports were returned with notes scribbled in the margins urging me to consider a career in whatever I'd been writing about.
Apparently I was not that quick of a study when it came to my own future; it took me several more years to figure out that the passion my teachers mistook for interest in a field was a passion to communicate.
When the light bulb finally went off I took an abrupt left turn out of the insurance industry and into the world of advertising, where I got to put my ability to write enthusiastically and convincingly about anything to good use. Along the way I also wrote a couple of small mystery novels, several children's books and umpteen million articles.
Fast forward a couple of decades, as my husband and I decide to abandon our corporate careers in the big city before we need to consider assisted living, and turn our dream of living on a mountaintop out West into reality.
Lifelong hikers, adventurers and lovers of wild things and wild places, one of the first things we did was volunteer for the Colorado Division of Wildlife's newly formed Bear Aware team, which was dedicated to improving human-bear relations. We quickly learned that not everyone is comfortable having four footed neighbors that could theoretically eat you.
We also learned that the vast majority of problems people have with bears are caused by people, not bears. And that inspiring people to be more responsible could save millions of dollars in property damage - and the lives of thousands of bears each year who are routinely put to death for the crime of trying to make a living in people country.
Passion and ability fused, I decided my new job was going to be creating a handbook for safe, smart living and playing in bear country. Something that would give people the information, inspiration and motivation they needed to prevent problems with bears. I wanted it to be fun to thumb through, easy to read and hard to forget. Or ignore.
Today LIVING WITH BEARS: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO BEAR COUNTRY has become the essential getting-along-with-bears bible. It's been favorably reviewed and endorsed by countless bear experts. And it's used by hundreds of communities, organizations, parks, forests and wildlife management agencies across North America. It has dispelled myths and made life easier for homeowners and outdoor enthusiasts. And bears.
There's nothing I love more than walking into a park office and having the staff reach for their well-thumbed, dog-eared, beaten up copy and ask for an autograph. Or having someone come up to me at a presentation and say "I used to be afraid of bears, but then I read your book. Now I yell at my neighbors about their garbage and bird feeders."
After all these years, I'm still a sucker for a happy ending.
