Two Canoes Press

Priscilla Cogan winner of Small Press Book Award and the Mind Body Spirit Award

It was a natural evolution for Priscilla Cogan, Ph.D. to follow her career as a clinical psychologist into writing novels. Married to Duncan Sings-Alone, Cherokee storyteller, psychologist, and Native American healer, she became a practitioner of Pipe and Sweat-lodge ceremonies. The cultural differences between the Lakota spiritual perspectives from that of the Anglo, psychological viewpoints continues to intrigue her. She fully believes that if you honor the differences, some interesting questions arise as to the very nature of reality.

Her first award-winning novel, Winona's Web, acquired an international following through translation into many languages. This lyrical and humorous novel tackles the subject of Death (and therefore Life) in the struggles between a middle-aged Anglo psychologist and an older Lakota medicine woman, two strong female characters who carry the force of their own cultural viewpoints. When Priscilla finished that book, she realized that she had to continue the journeys of the two women in Compass of The Heart - a novel about love and the Trickster energy. This second novel explores in greater depth the Lakota spiritual rituals and the love between the psychologist and the (medicine man) prodigy of Winona. The third and last novel in the series, Crack at Dusk: Crook of Dawn, takes the reader on a psychological roller-coaster ride with the same characters into an exploration of how these two cultures define and respond to Evil in very different ways. It is an archetypal series that powerfully hits those experiences that touch all of us in one way or another. Even in the darkest passages of the third book, there is humor, for "in everything funny, there is something serious and in everything serious, there is something funny."

Priscilla admits that writing the book on evil was emotionally exhausting but accurate, coming from her work with traumatized clients. She vowed that the next book was going to be really funny. People have asked her who are her literary mentors (of which there are many), but she decided to write two intertwined stories of different styles, characters, and themes - one in the manner of a modern thriller and the other in the 1940's romantic traditions (think Daphne Du Maurier). An agent said it couldn't be done and that it would confuse the reader. She proved him wrong with Double Time. When readers, forty and younger, delight in the love story, she refers them back to 1940's literature.

Priscilla's loyal fans wrote and e-mailed, asking for another novel featuring a Native American character. Up came "Agatha" - an opinionated, no-nonsense Lakota woman who answers the tag-line of the novel, The Unraveling Thread, - Where is Mary Poppins now when you really need her? She is the catalyst to the family of the overwhelmed and divorced Harriet McWhinnie, a successful financial officer who is in the sandwich generation of caretaking. Harriet's family consists of her mother with Alzheimer's disease, two fifteen year old girls (one psychotic and with a genetic disorder, the other rebellious), a little boy who wants his father back home, and a dog with Attention Deficit Disorder. This is the first piece of fiction to describe Deletion 22 Syndrome, also known as Velo-Cardio-Facial Syndrome. Oh, and Agatha? Well, she has her own secret past that comes back to haunt her.

Priscilla has also been working on the screenplay adaptation of Winona's Web, slated to be made into a movie. She doubts that there is any novelist totally happy with the translation from novel form to that of the silver screen, as so much has to be omitted! And once you sell a screenplay, you no longer own the copyright.

Quite a few people have requested continuation of the Winona Series to which Priscilla responds, "After exploring death and life, love and the Trickster Spirit, the problem of evil and the nature of healing - what is there? - "Meggie Enters Menopause?" Humor aside, she has learned never to say never.

And her next project is .... well, Priscilla won't tell you. That would be like stealing fire from the belly.

In 2010, Grandfather Sings-Alone was fully ordained a Zen Priest in the order Zen Garland: An International Spiritual Community. This is an interfaith Zen order to which he is bringing Native spiritual teachings. Duncan is an enrolled Cherokee (Georgia Tribe of Eastern Cherokee), a storyteller, healer, ceremonialist, and spiritual teacher. His book, Sprinting Backwards to God, contains many lessons told in story form.

At 74, he looks back on a life that has taken odd twists and turns. Starting out as a professional musician, he followed in his father’s footsteps and completed college and seminary to become a protestant minister....a huge mistake. Escaping the parish, he completed a Ph.D., taught and practiced Psychology for the next 30 years.

Like so many others, the Wounded Knee occupation called Duncan back to his roots, and he became deeply involved in Native American spiritual practices. Spirits led him to a Lakota/Monacan medicine man with whom he studied intensively for seven years sometimes participating in or pouring six sweatlodges a week. The Sacred Pipe and the Inipi have been his sacred home for thirty eight years. In 1988, following a Vision Quest, he organized a national inter-tribal spiritual group, The Free Cherokees, dedicated to fostering Native sacred teachings to people who no longer had connections to their reservations or tribes. Although no longer conducting sweatlodge ceremonies, he is offering workshops in many different venues.

He is married to Priscilla Cogan who shares his commitment to the Red Road. She holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and has published five novels, four of which feature the interface between Native American and Anglo cultures.
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Wendy Parciak was named after the Wendy in Peter Pan, which may explain why she’s always loved a good story. Growing up, her favorites were Alice in Wonderland, The Phantom Tollbooth, Pippi Longstocking and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, each of which she must have read twenty or thirty times. She also loved her father’s spur-of-the-moment variations on Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, which he shared with the family when they were huddled around a tiny camp stove in Washington’s Cascade Mountains, hoping to keep the darkness and the bugs at bay. She read voraciously and made a library out of her books, which she loaned out to the neighborhood kids. Some of them still have tiny identifying numbers taped to their covers.

Despite a lifetime of reading, Wendy hasn’t always been a writer. In a misguided effort to "make up" for her handicapped sister, she decided early in life that she would be a famous concert musician. She practiced cello six hours a day and went to the Julliard School of Music in New York City. She would probably still be there or in some other large city, practicing all day and then dressing up in black in the evenings and walking into the bright onstage lights, if she had not injured her arm during her third year at Juilliard. After an unsuccessful year spent trying to rehabilitate herself, she made the bold decision to try something new.

Wendy moved back to the west and obtained a BS in wildlife science from the University of Washington. In her spare time, she worked as a wilderness ranger and a field biologist, figuring out, among other things, how to catch a species of diving duck with the help of a motorboat and a mist net, surveying Puget Sound waterfowl from a small floatplane, and searching for songbirds and their nests in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, the muskegs of Alaska and the mountains of Arizona. She then moved to Missoula, Montana to obtain a PhD in ecology from The University of Montana. She liked it so much there that she never left.

Wendy currently lives in a solar-powered log house in the woods with her husband, five-year-old son and three very active border collies. She obtains food locally as much as possible and drives a Prius to try to minimize her carbon footprint. She wrote Requiem for Locusts, her first novel, to explore how people react when confronted by a psychotic individual whose life is more out of control than their own. She based much of her knowledge on her own mentally-ill sister, who was diagnosed after years of visual and auditory hallucinations with a genetic disorder called Velocardiofacial syndrome.