La Fte de la Vie

She recognized that experimentation is an essential part of the process when she wrote to her short story course instructor G. Miki Hayden in 2000, "this is the time for me to try it and learn in the trying."

The author tried to write her first story in 1995- "La Fête de la Vie" ("The Celebration of Life"). She was sixty years old. The story won 1st place in the Palm Springs Writers Guild Short Story Contest and was published in the September 2000 issue of Palm Springs Life.

"I have to go through the process with a germ of an idea, then rewrite, rewrite, struggle, pain and agony, and then, voila," she wrote in 2001.

There was a lot of "voila" between 1998 and 2001 when eight of the fourteen stories in this collection were written. Perhaps helping her husband battle cancer to remission at the time led to an unleashing of creative energy.

"I have written four books during stressful times of illness," she wrote, "my mother's cancer, me with rheumatoid arthritis, Paul's cancer, and my cancer. Isolated and separated from society and normal activity, the mind turns inward. The concentration of the inner self seems to release a productive period of creativity. It is an escape from the real world with all its inherent problems."

"Is it in the knowledge of death that life is truly celebrated?" the author asks. "I believe it is so."

The stories and poems in this collection explore themes of grief and loss, the celebration and continuum of life, fulfillment of pledges made between friends, rediscovery of the self after trauma, and the value of family.

Jacqueline Bachar, author and editor of Poetry in the Garden, Life on the Ohio Frontier, Images of a Woman, and An Exploration of Boundaries, was named a 2010 Woman of Distinction by the National League of PEN Women and awarded a Certificate of Congressional Recognition.