Celestina wrote her first book at the age of five.  It was entitled The Cat Who Sat on the Mat, she illustrated it herself, and she still has a copy stashed away in the closet.  She’d like to dedicate that first book, retroactively, to the cats who raised her, and to her mother who did, in fact, read The Cat Who Sat on the Mat and encouraged Celestina to keep trying (after pointing out that cats do not have belly buttons).

Since that time, Celestina has done many things.  She survived public education, went to college for fine art, produced offspring, and has run a couple of vastly different businesses.  She was attacked by a giant millepede, made a birthday cake in the shape of the One Ring and inscribed it with icing in Elven, went to Australia where she kidnapped a family of Aussies and got to see the stars upside down, made masks out of papier mache and feathers, quilts out of a generation of shirts, a Christmas tree out of old umbrellas and baby hands, and subsequently stared down the ghost of Helen’s Bridge.  She has rescued snakes, had chats with mountain lions and a lynx, and helped quite a few fear-aggressive dogs become calmer, happier creatures.  She’s even done the same for a few humans.

She never stopped writing.  Sometimes there are stories she just has to get out of her head.  Sometimes the news is so infuriating she just has to write out her frustration.  For a little while, she was a part of a community called Newsvine, and a lot of the older work on this site was originally published there (so if you see reference to seeds or comment threads that don’t exist, that’s probably why).  Sometimes she writes open letters, but that doesn’t mean you can’t read them even though they’re not to you.  And sometimes she writes poetry…but don’t worry; it’s not mixed up with the other stuff.  You can avoid it if you want to.