About Lee

Lee Kochenderfer       I don't write for a living, although that would be nice.
I write to feel alive. As small a thing as one well-phrased paragraph can turn an ordinary day into a special one.
      My love of writing began with being read to. One book that stands out in memory featured a kitten who repeated a phrase, "Purr-severance wins!" Whenever I hit a snag in life, I still hear that kitten, in my mother's soft voice, saying, "Purr-severance wins." I first reported this book as "not a classic, I fear, because it's no longer around." Imagine my excitement to discover that is indeed around, although scarce. More about that on a blog, later.
        A proud Kansas native, I grew up as Lee Anne McIntosh, in Lincoln, a small town in the center of the state. Life is abundant in small towns, microcosms of hunanity at large, where life plays out behind doors and on main streets--love and hate, friendship and enmity, patience and exasperation, faith and doubt, industriousness and sloth, face and shame--the stuff of life, and of fiction.
        I would like to say I hated school. Rebels are so loved in fiction! The truth is, I liked school, especially when it involved writing. That I could make my own words and thoughts visible, thrilled me. Still does. I loved the sound of writing, the soft scratch of pencil on paper Now, I use a computer, with a keyboard that clicks, the new sound of writing.
        In research for my first book, The Victory Garden, I found that the victory gardens were of greater importance to the war effort than I had known. Nearly half of the vegetables consumed in the U.S. during the second world war were grown in back yard gardens. Children played a large part in that. So that seemed like a good place to begin to tell children today about the war and how life was for children then.
                                            WORK IN PROGRESS
        Research for my current Work-in-Progress takes me far afield from Kansas. With the working title, Diligent Tiger: The Boy Who Loved China, it has been close to a decade in utero. Hoping to deliver soon.
                                                OTHER WRITING
        Much of my writing has been in short stories or articles. A few of my favorites:
        "They Sing America's Ethnic History," about internationally known folk-singing educators, Keith and Rusty McNeil. Published late in the civil rights movement, in Scholastic Teacher.
       "Flashes," short story in Lynx Eye, Vol. IV, No. 4, Fall 1997
        "Reconsider the Lilies," in Chicken Soup for the Christian Woman's Soul, 2002
        "Children and Learning,"a small-town newspaper column, especially
one titled "Children and Yearning."
        "See Dick and Jane Learning to Read," Op-ed in The Press-Enterprise, Riverside, CA, 1996
        Various academic articles in CAPED Journal (California Post-Secondary Educators of the Disabled).
         Poem, unpublished but one of my quirky favorites, "Leftovers"
                                                Twice nice rice
                                                    Is not nice
                                                       Thrice.