Last month South Cariboo resident Brenda Cooper became a published author.
Cooper has been published in group poetry collections several times but her children’s book Halloween Hullabaloo! marks her first solo work to be published. The overwhelming response it’s gotten has made her happy and given her fresh motivation to add more books to her library.
“It’s been so encouraging. I never thought, at my age, I’d get to this place and I’ve enjoyed it. When my book was first published seeing the response it got, I shed a tear,” Cooper said. “To get that encouragement doing what I love to do makes me happy.”
Halloween Hullabaloo! is described on Amazon as a heartwarming tale of discovery and friendship starring Dixey the Donkey. With no idea about what Halloween is about, the other farm animals teach Dixey about Halloween.
Cooper said she’s been writing on and off for decades now, mostly poetry inspired by her life’s journey and an abusive relationship she was in during her younger years. Writing about her experiences was a way to overcome the emotions from the darker periods of her life and help her understand them.
While she enjoyed her writing, Cooper said she never considered making a career out of it. Instead, she focused on working as an administrative manager for a trucking company in Surrey for 25 years and later as a school bus driver for five years.
In 2021 Cooper and her husband retired and moved up to a farm on Bridge Lake. While they had to learn about farming from “YouTube University” she said they loved their new life and their view of the mountains.
Shortly after Cooper and her husband moved, she decided to start sharing her work publicly for the first time. That October leading up to Halloween she published a new poem every day on Facebook as a fun writing exercise.
“Every morning I got up with my coffee I sat and blurted out a poem. I just got such unbelievable feedback that it encouraged me to pursue writing,” Cooper said.
After October came to an end an old friend of Cooper, who runs a publishing company, reached out and asked her to submit a few poems for several group poetry books. Over the last few years, her poems have been published in several which gave her the confidence to start thinking about releasing her own book.
Cooper said her poetry tends to be dark based on experiences from her life. As she began to put together her first solo book she relied on a mix of new poetry and poems curated from those she’s written over the years. She describes it as a “gallery of dark poems” that’s close to 100 pages long.
“I’m trying to do a coffee table book,” Cooper said. “I want to get it out by Christmas so I’m working hard on it. I have a list of titles but I might just go with ‘Symphony of Horror’ or ‘Symphony of Nightmares’.”
Wanting to self-publish on Amazon, Cooper decided to test the waters by publishing a children’s book to work out any kinks in the process. She decided to write one based on a farm and chose to use her middle name, Dixey, for the main character.
“I write such dark poems all the time and the children’s book was so out of my realm that I just loved doing it,” Cooper said. “I write so much about my journey and the children’s book came from living here on the farm.”
While Cooper wrote the story herself, she relied on Midjourney to illustrate the book. A form of stable diffusion AI, Midjourney creates AI art based on prompts given by the user.
Learning how to use it was a new challenge, Cooper said, but she learned how to use Midjourney to generate images she then edited using Photoshop. She admits the use of AI art can be controversial among artists and writers.
“I don’t just take an image, pull it out and dump it into my book. I take it into my Photoshop and Canva to make changes to the image. (Midjourney) gives me a start or a background I can add images to,” Cooper said. “The writing is all mine, though.”
In addition to her upcoming poetry book, Cooper said she’s decided to write another children’s book titled ‘Mum Where Do Puppies Come From?’ inspired by her own dog having puppies recently. Once those two are published she plans to move on to a new poetry project.
“Being retired and living where we are with all this beautiful scenery, I’ll just sit by the window and look out at all that. It really does encourage me,” Cooper said. “A lot of those poems just come from me staring out at the forest at night, my mind just gets carried away.”
