Helen Gregory

I was three years old when my mother gave me pencil and paper, taught me how to make a few letters of the alphabet, and encouraged me to write names. By age nine or ten, I was creating little paper books and "teaching school" to the dolls sitting against the pillow of my bed. I wrote stories for extra credit in grade school, then a term paper in high school—on three Eastern Religions—but I couldn't submit it plain. Oh no, I had to type it, staple the pages between sheets of orange construction paper, and draw symbols of those religions on the front cover. In college, a term paper was based on the traditions of Christmas in Sweden.

After high school and two years of college, I worked for a small loan company in Seattle and married a young man with Type 1 diabetes. Soon we followed the 60's crowd to California, but returned to Seattle five months later. That's where my new car dealership employment began—from Ford to Volkswagen to Porsche+Audi—from title clerk to office manager. My post-job years got lost within the mix of my husband's frequent insulin reactions, the onset of his diabetic complications, and assisting with the growing needs of my father and mother. But the creative pull of my spirit refused to die.

In the mid-1980s, I revisited my term paper about a Swedish Christmas. It became my first self-published book: "How to make a Swedish Christmas!" (Still in print today, in 2020). Thereafter came a book on how to make newsletters, which reached number nine on Quality Books' Top 40 list of sales to libraries, and appeared as the alternate choice in the Writers Digest Book Club monthly offering. A small business handbook on finding customers followed, with good reviews but poor marketing on my part, as my time was taken up by the circumstances of my husband's declining health. "Diabetes by Marriage" has come some years later (2020). I have more books to create, and am thankful for the KDP opportunity!