About Rachel

So many wonderful stories were shared around this table.

It began with listening to my parents tell stories around this immense, antique oak table…

My mother loved to cook and throw parties, inviting the most interesting friends.

My earliest memories come from sitting spellbound, listening to these people regale each other with stories from around the globe.

My creative career also started at this table when my mother taught me how to sew. This included trips to the dry good store to search for a pattern, then hunt for just the right fabric, buttons, laces, and other embellishments.

Once home we began the painstaking work of getting fabric, buttons, and bows to conform to an exacting, highly structured sewing pattern. Today, I use a similar process with my writing: taking characters, settings, sensory details, themes, tropes, plot lines, and transmuting them into a solid, archetypal story structure that gives readers a satisfying story adventure.

It’s come full circle, I still work every day at this magical table, imbued with all of that great story-telling and creative energy from my parents’ parties and my everyday life. So pull up a chair, and I’ll serve you tantalizing mysteries with a mystical zest and a teaspoon full of the unexpected.

Rachel Funk Heller

I come from a family of storytellers

About the Author

Born and raised in Hawaii, I come from a family of storytellers. My father was a sailor who served in World War II. He told tales of landing on the Normandy beaches on D-Day, and how he later sought a quiet life here in the tropics. My mother was a botanist who traveled throughout the south Pacific gathering plant specimens and often finding plants that were once thought extinct. During the war she wasn’t “Rosie the Riveter” but Evangeline the Welder, building airplanes in San Diego.

As a child I sat enraptured at my mother’s kitchen table, listening to their stories. I can remember a night when my parents friends came over for dinner and the adults were deep in conversation. One of their kids begged me to come play with them. I said, “wait a minute, I want to hear how this story ends.”

That was the beginning of my storytelling career. It took me to studying Journalism, working in television production and now to my career as a novelist.

15

types of tea on my kitchen counter

365

dog walks
and counting

5

certificates of completion from truby story university

150

unused notebooks begging to be used