Local author offers special message

By Barry Porterfield
Staff Writer

July 20, 2008 03:43 pm

— Using the written word, complete with colorful illustrations, to not only entertain but also offer young children a good and moral lesson in life was the idea behind a Pauls Valley area woman’s first ever book.
Gayle Bonner is hoping her new children’s book, “Life on Peavine Creek, Sam’s Story,” will be out next month and available for readers to get a copy.
Bonner has never attempted to write something like a book until her imagination took off one day as she watched a family dog a few years ago.
What she saw was one dog doing everything he could to be accepted by the group there at the time.
“In about 2004 I thought about writing a book. We were feeding cattle one day and our son’s dog named Sam was running along side our truck,” Bonner said, adding that Sam is now 7 years old.
“He wanted so much to be a part of what we were doing. It just came to my mind to write a story about it,” she said.
“This was written from the perspective of a dog who wants to prove he’s as special as other dogs around him.”
She started writing later that same day and in almost no time it was done.
“In about 30 minutes I had a book. I tweaked it a bit, and I toyed with the idea of getting a publisher but I was lost when it came to that. It just sat there for a long time. It laid around until this year.”
All of this took place at the cattle ranch, complete with roping arena, located a few miles northeast of Pauls Valley that Gayle and her husband Richard have lived on for more than four decades.
Another slant to Gayle’s book is all five of her grandchildren join Sam in the story.
They ranged between 1 and 10 years old when the book was written.
“It was written about my family actually. It’s about Sam interacting with our family,” she said.
It’s also Sam who’s at the center of the story’s real message meant for the really young kiddos.
That message comes in an important lesson that Sam learns about himself, Bonner said.
“He does prove he’s special. That’s the message — that anybody can be special.”
Once Bonner did decide to pursue a publisher for her book, she hooked up with fellow Pauls Valley resident Brandon Johnson, who is the nephew of her brother-in-law.
Johnson then went on to do all the illustrations for Bonner’s book.
The idea really took off when PublishAmerica expressed an interest in publishing her story and putting the finished product in book stores.
That’s something Gayle believes will likely come next month — definitely before Labor Day, she said.
The stores where her book will be available also remain unknown for now.
When it does come out she has plans to share her story with young students by reading it to them in their classrooms at area schools once the new term begins.
“If this book does have any success I’m hoping PublishAmerica will ask me to write a sequel. I would love to do a sequel,” she said.
“It would be a book about different animals around Peavine Creek.
“There’s an infinite array of topics that I could do in a sequel.”

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