Iola middle and high school photography teacher Donna Regehr is known to have an eye for the creative. But she also has an ear, and put pen to paper to prove it in publishing a new suspense romance novel, “Desert Gold, the Legend of Chinook.”
“I’ve wanted to do this for 35 years,” Regehr said of self-publishing a book.
“I’ve written other stories before,” Regehr said, but for one reason or another, she never pursued having them published. This summer, surfing online, she found Eloquent Books, an on-demand publisher that is promoting her work through amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.
“It’s already sold some,” she said.
Regehr, whose classroom boasts a bounty of photographs of far-off places, set her tale in her own frequent haunts.
“I have gone to Colorado a million times,” Regehr said of the landscape of the book. “I’ve climbed Gray Rock Mountain, where Natty finds the statue.”
In Regehr’s book, a college senior, Natty Darrow, finds a small statue tucked in the nook of a tree on a mountain trail.
Intrigued, the girl takes the trinket with her, but gets the uneasy feeling she is being watched.
Turns out, she is.
The statue, of pure gold, was stolen from a tribe Regehr calls Cotiquette. The thief was about to retrieve it when Darrow stumbled upon it.
REGEHR based her tale on impressions gleaned from her travels in the American Southwest.
The tribe depicted in the book does not exist, Regehr said.
“I didn’t want to get involved in any group’s belief system,” she said.
The statue, she said, “represents Chinook, a legendary tribal hunter.”
The tribe’s custom dictated that the statue would have gone to Chinook’s bride upon their marriage. Instead, etiquette was breached, and the young couple was banished. Since then, the icon has served as a reminder of following the tribe’s elaborate engagement ritual.
Darrow, however, is unaware of the figurine’s significance. She meets with a local college professor, but is unnerved by the man — an artifacts dealer posing as an educator.
Darrow then joins friends at a local club where she “meets a handsome Indian fellow. That’s where the romance comes in,” Regehr said.
THE STORY is a “light romance,” Regehr said. “There’s nothing sweaty about it.”
“After all,” Regehr quipped, “I’m a school teacher.”
Regehr said she wrote the book because she loves to read.
“The funny thing is,” she said, “I don’t read a lot of romances.”
But she does like fantasies, so, she said, “I put a lot of fantasy into this book.”
Her next book, which she has already begun, delves more into that realm.
“The antagonist in the story is something intangible,” she said. The story is “less romance and more suspense.”
And, she said, the scenery is unearthly. “The shadows are on the wrong side of the light, that sort of thing.”
Regehr said she will probably follow the same route in publishing the new story.
For now, she is hoping to expand readership of “Desert Gold.”
“I’m going to have the librarian at the middle school look at it and see what she thinks,” Regehr noted. And, she said, “The principal at the high school, David Grover, told me he is going to order two copies for its library. I’m really excited about that.”
