Harriet Cole

When Harriet was a small child, the power of story – in this case the Norwegian folktale “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” – convinced her that trolls could be found under any bridge, including the one over the Rio Grande near her home in northern New Mexico. She highly approved of those trolls, since they worried her younger sibling.

After that introduction to the power of story it is not surprising that she spent a number of her adult years working for a small-town weekly newspaper. Then she took a professional detour into the field of traffic engineering – programming and fixing traffic signals paid much better than journalism – and ended up in the Phoenix AZ area.

There she attended the first Mesa Storytelling Festival where she immediately fell in love with oral narrative. This led to her almost-immediate enrollment in the South Mountain Community College Storytelling Institute. Although Harriet planned to earn an Academic Certificate in Storytelling, she also became a member of the Institute’s adjunct faculty. Her experience in teaching storytelling and children’s literature to community college students as well as telling stories to children of all ages taught her this: big kids need stories too!

She found those big-kid stories in the material (Scandinavian folktales and epics) that she told a number of times during Experience Scandinavia events at the Musical Instrument in Phoenix. She created her first book, “Fifteen Pounds of Muscle and Bounce,” especially for kids, generally age 10 and up, who appreciate trolls more than princesses. And if there are princesses, those princesses are entirely capable of taking charge of their own fates.