Rosanne Parry

Rosanne Parry spent her first years as a teacher in Taholah, Washington, on the Quinault Indian Reservation. There she learned to love the taste of alder-smoked, blueback salmon, the wind and the cold mists of the rain forest, the sounds of the ocean and the eagles, and the rhythm of a life that revolved around not the clock and the calendar, but the cycle of the salmon running up the river and returning to the ocean. While there she never met a child who could not tell her a story—usually one that included a monster of epic proportions. The writer she became had everything to do with the people she came to cherish and the land between the Pacific and the Olympic Mountains where stories seemed to grow out of the earth all around her, tall and sturdy as cedars.