It isn't often that a childhood dream becomes reality. Those youthful imaginings of being a movie star or baseball player, princess or race car driver so often become derailed by the time we reach adulthood and the real world
Kris Radish always wanted to write fiction and she fed her passion by reading everything in sight at her local library; at St. Joseph's grade school in Big Bend and later at UW-Waukesha, where a teacher, Mr. Jozwiak, became her mentor.
She got married, had two kids and wrote novels - several of them - that gathered dust in the garage.
Radish joined some 100 authors at the first Southeast Wisconsin Festival of Books over the weekend and told her story in the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, just steps away from where she sat as a student.
Throughout her talk of broken dreams, broken marriage and being just plain broke there was one theme that resonated - determination. "I have Nancy Drew to thank," she said of her favorite childhood books. "If Nancy can do it, so can I!"
She got halfway to her dream as a reporter out West and even dodged bullets in Bosnia. But she was also collecting characters along the way, as she kept herself fiscally afloat by doing everything from "shoveling goat poop" to bartending.
She wrote a couple of nonfiction books, including "Run, Bambi, Run," the story of Lawrencia Bembenek, the Milwaukee cop convicted of killing her husband's ex-wife, but the characters in her head were screaming to dance and play in the pages of a book.
Then came her novel "An Elegant Gathering of White Snows," followed by 43 rejections from publishers. Like her heroine, Nancy Drew, Radish was not about to give up on these characters she had fed and nourished in her mind for so long. She found a publisher and then a bigger publisher.
Women started reading and watching for her novels with "Thelma & Louise" themes, and the books and the checks kept coming. With her inimitable sense of humor she calls her genre "Broads Who Have Been There" or "Estrogen Defense League," and her books have sold in the millions.
It isn't an easy life, but it is one that fits the 56-year-old author like a book cover. She jokes about herself and her fellow writers as "people (who) fell and hit their heads when they were young children"; legislation she hopes will be passed not allowing people to share books ("buy your own," she urges); and the many characters in her head waiting for their chance to star in her books.
Radish was the last of three featured speakers at the Festival of Books - A. Manette Ansay and Reed Farrel Coleman spoke on Friday.
Her words were encouragement to anyone who dreams of being a writer, and encouragement to the festival organizers that there are still many more stories to be told in future festivals.
And there will be more authors who can echo Radish when she says, "I do what I was born to do."
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