Friend FridayKimber

When our paths crossed at the Michigan Reading Association conference on Mackinac Island, what first caught my eye about Kimberli Bindschatel was her bag. Isn't it amazing? It's made to look like her book!

Of course, I had to ask  her how she'd made it and one thing led to another, which led to my inviting her to be a guest on Friend Friday. Take it away, Kimberli!

Kimberli Bindschatel

I wasn’t always a writer. I mean, as a serious pursuit. I’ve always been an artist and nature lover. Only recently did I decide to find writing as a way to explore my passions.

Born and raised in Michigan, I spent summers at the lake, swimming and chasing fireflies, winters building things out of cardboard and construction paper, writing stories, and dreaming of faraway places. Since I didn’t make honors English in high school, I thought I couldn’t write. So I started hanging out in the art room. The day I borrowed a camera, my love affair with photography began. Long before the birth of the pixel, I was exposing real silver halides to light and marveling at the magic of an image appearing on paper under a red light.

After college, I freelanced in commercial photography studios. During the long days of rigging strobes, one story haunted me. As happens in life though, before I could put it to words, I was possessed by another dream—to be a wildlife photographer. I trekked through the woods to find loons, grizzly bears, whales, and moose. Then, for six years, I put my heart and soul into publishing a nature magazine, Whisper in the Woods. But it was not meant to be my magnum opus. This time, my attention was drawn skyward. I’d always been fascinated by the aurora borealis, shimmering in the night sky, but now my focus went beyond, to the cosmos, to wonder about our place in the universe.

In the spring of 2010, I sat down at the computer, started typing words, and breathed life into a curious boy named Kiran. Together, in our quest for truth, Kiran and I have explored the mind and spirit. Our journey has taken us to places of new perspective. Alas, the answers always seem just beyond our grasp, as elusive as a firefly on a warm autumn night.

Kimberli A. Bindschatel’s debut novel, The Path to the Sun, is the story of seven teens who set out on a quest to save their forsaken village, but when it turns into a fight for survival, sixteen-year old Kiran is forced to question everything he was taught to believe about faith, truth, and his place--and ours--in the natural world.