Blog

When I was fourteen and life had taken its hormonal turn, pushing me out of the childhood home that I thought was permanent, I bought a monkey...

[I began] opening the images I carried with me to find the experience, the meaning, the feeling, the story...As I wrote them, they became...the story of my first-generation American family...

“Ticked Off!” captured my imagination. It felt like a title for a children’s book. I thought of a clock. Then the story opened to me...

In her 40th post, Helena shares another original children’s story—a counting story—and creative process behind both writing and illustrating it.

In her 39th post, Helena shares an original children’s story, and the writing exercise behind its inception.

I am still painting flowers in glasses. Different destinies. Different kinds of artists, people. Maybe stars. But it was a privilege to see, in a kind of secret act, that lovely little painting...

Soft-edged and dreamy, on a deeper brown neutral ground, so that the beauty of orange, with its green tones and reds, its yellows and lavender grays, is revealed. The image captivated me...

My older sister, Jolene, was the ringleader in our sister group. It was a group of only us two...We were an organism. Where did she stop and I begin? I can't find a fixed edge...

Children's stories with an accumulation, or a great multiplicity of something as its central theme and/or structure, go back to books written before I was a child...

Fifty-three years is a long time to contemplate who my mother was. And I see something else now, now that I bring my need for connection to life itself, without a parent to mediate...