Leigh Podgorski

I have been writing since I was old enough to hold a #2 pencil against a pad of blue-lined yellow paper. My first inspiration was Jingles, the Happy Cobbler though I can't say how inspired my kindergarten class was by my reading of the story. I am amazed by the diversity of the Earth, by her cultures and her mythologies, her symbolisms and her colors that spring so incessantly from that stream, as Joseph Campbell writes, that bubbles up from the deepest reaches of our collective unconscious to influence and inform and ultimately to unify the universes that flow within and without us. In 1985, I had the distinct privilege of interviewing Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross for my one-act play Windstorm. Here was a celebrated doctor who had penetrated the fourth wall, who saw visions, who communicated with the dead, and who, through her visions, taught us more about, as she said, not how to die, but how to live. While producing the play festival CelebrateWomen, I interviewed another great woman, Cahuilla elder Katherine Siva Saubel. Dr. Saubel, like Dr Ross, was a great healer, and a great visionary. She could call the wind by whistling for it to blow down from the mountains to cool the steaming valley below. From her oral history, I wrote first the play We Are Still Here; then, as a recipient of a California Council for the Humanities grant, I adapted the play for a documentary of the same title. "The film also portrays the Creation mythology of the Cahuilla, performed by a Native American cast, which is well done and sustains viewer interest. There are a lot of important ideas and traditions illuminated here. [The]film [s] will be appreciated by history buffs, students of Native American history, and general viewers.--Margaret B. Miller, Univ. of South Dakota Lib., Vermillion"--Library Journal Review. I have written numerous award-winning plays and screenplays. My plays have been produced in New York City and Los Angeles and regionally. In 2010, I wrote my debut novel, The Women Debrowska, the story of a family interwoven with 250 years of Polish history and the indomitable spirit of the Polish people. "...Very beautiful, powerful, and deeply touching...Besides that... it is a love letter to Poland..." M. Serra "When the plane crashed...carrying the Polish statesmen..I felt as if they were brethren of mine. Ms. Podgorski's saga told the story of Polish history in a way that made its memories mine." C Herron "The story is powerful and heartbreaking, and at heart, a love story..." Jackie Maxwell "Flowing with great energy and speed..." G White "... a saga of love, inter-generational (and international) family affairs, and history..." Douglas Glenn Clark In 2011, I published Ouray's Peak, a coming age novel that follows the journey of Kristin Tabor as she treks cross-country journey to find her mother, and eventually, her heart. 2012 saw the publication of the first two books of the Stone Quest Series: Deset Chimera and Gallows Ascending which follow the journey of recluse, tracker, and reluctant pyschic visionary Luke Stone, and take the reader deep within Luke's paranormal universe.