Helena Writes

“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.

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...

I often mention to students what I call “The Writer’s Palette.” I call it that because I was a painter before I wrote. Most of my parallels come from painting...

My dad whistled. Cheer was part of his nature. He whistled around the house and in the car, and sometimes he sang.

It was the feeling under my father’s words that recorded itself in me. My father’s feeling was, then, and is now, my ground. Not his feelings. But his Feeling. The world of his feeling that included the cosmos...

We step onto firm ground when Marilyn gets to the thing that is waiting, underneath everything she says, the thing she can't forget. Right there, in the middle of the air, we're standing on something solid.