"Girls, quiet down!" Daddy shouted over the roar of our backseat argument. Hundreds of miles of farmland had raced by the window. My two sisters and I were as grumpy as a grizzlies and pitching a hissy fit in the rear seat of the station wagon.

        "Momma, she's looking out my window again!"

"I want to SEE!"

"Look out your own window!"

"Have I ever told you girls the story of how Kettleman City got it's name?" Momma began in her soft tones. Immediately, we settled down to listen. Daddy rolled his eyes. He'd heard a million of her goofy stories. He pretended like they were torture, but he was all ears. We laughed the miles away as the ridiculous tale played out.

Imagination was the stuff Debra cut her teeth on. She would sit for hours as a child writing stories about two mouse characters, Max and Seymore. Storytelling is in her DNA.

   When her own four children were little they would listen to book after book, sometimes audio stories would play in the car as they akk went about their errands. Sometimes they would make up Haiku poems with their mom about things they saw on long drives. 

Writing down her stories got lost somewhere amid music lessons, soccer practices, and home schooling.

After homeschooling Debra opened a fine art business. First, decorative interior painting, then trompe l'oeil murals and finally landscapes and portraiture. More recently, during the Covid pandemic, she painting pet portraits and managed to complete over 70 portraits in a single year. She compiled them into a coffee table book, The Painted Pet, her first published book. Click the link below.

Understandably, she was completely burnt out and took a break from painting. See some of her art on her Facebook page below. Debra learned to make twisted wire jewelry which she sold with her landscapes at the local farmer's market. 

One day while organizing her computer files, Debra came across an old file: Moxie the Doxie. She remembers thinking, If only I could figure out how to illustrate it on the computer. She must have said that out loud, because a video came up not long after showing how to illustrate a children's book using the Canva app. That's all the encouragement she needed. Debra was hooked and ready to finish.

The story was edited, formatted, illustrated and printed quick as a wink, but more importantly, it gave her the confidence to try again. This time she wanted to have the freedom to  make her own illustrations the way she imagined them.

Though she had been a professional artist for over forty years, it had all been "hands on" with a paintbrush, no digital work. She searched for an online digital illustration school and jumped in feet first. 

Debra tackled the long process of learning. First switching from HP and learning to use an iPad. Then, the necessary digital art app. Finally, illustration school. Nearly a year of writing, editing, and creating later, Live TALL Like Hazel Duvall was ready to publish under her imprint, FLIBBITYgIBBIT PRESS.