Every night, long after my mom declared bedtime, I hid under the covers with a pile of books. With a sliver of light from the back alley, I read for hours. Maybe she suspected. I was always the kid looking backward when we walked, and had to be tugged along. Words seemed to jump from everywhere--fast moving buses, storefronts, signposts--words that meant something I was too young to decipher. So I found them in books and stories that merged into my dreams, night after night. Perhaps that is where my own stories began, linked to the rhythms of early language and illustrations glittering in the half light.

My life became a hyperspace for storytelling. In Montana, our young children played on the high prairie, touched the night sky, felt the wind tear across the foothills. Our Native American daughter "read" the earth, smelled spring coming. We imagined stories of Sioux hunters gathered on the Missouri Breaks, cowboys and Indians down the next gorge. In New England, our stories grew tamer like the landscapes, but sideways snowstorms were locked in vivid memory. Our son challenged the earth, grew up with a log splitter in one hand and a book in the other.

From peaceful Vermont and New Hampshire, my husband and I traveled for medical work to the Soviet Union after the Berlin wall fell. Loving language, I learned Russian to navigate the New Independent States, to listen for the meaning of conversation, to understand the children. Russian literature that I read in high school became more "real" in those solemn countries. I was drawn to Pushkin's fairy tale images painted with exquisite detail on lacquer boxes, and stories about an old hag who lived in the forest, waiting for children. We waited, too, eventually adopting two girls from Russia in 2003 and 2007.

Jo Ann and Steven with their daughter Alona, Kristina and Carole, and son Daniel.

Since then, we have 3 grandchildren of Haitian and Caucasian/Russian descent and one grandchild who is Native American/African American. The first full book I read under the covers was "Beauty and the Beast." That now seems a profoundly coincidental first story. As the stories I told my children became more whimsical, filled with images from distant and foreign lands, my left brain turned to professional medical/science writing. I synthesize research findings, publish articles in major medical journals. Though highly technical, they are stories nonetheless.

Princess Secrets was inspired by my granddaughters, Jada (just turned 5) and Jaleen (just short of 3). They are exotic, precocious and multilingual. We started making up stories together and writing them down for fun. At the same time, I began teaching myself Photoshop and learned to compose photobooks. And that is how Princess Secrets came to life. "Jada always dreamed of being a real princess..."