About Marilyn Van Orden

What to know about her:

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While traveling through Europe, South America, and Alaska, Marilyn was fascinated with the ideas of folklore that recur in patterns throughout the world. In graduate school her focus was also on folklore, the similarities of cultures, the reflections of stories from Tlingit to Sioux to Rapa Nui or Maya.

During visits to Ireland and Alaska, she learned of legends new to her, but still fitting into the large pantheon of captivating and enchanting folk tales and mythologies that include both Greek and Scandinavian.

With a biblical background and fascination for scriptures, she often braids those stories (or variations of the stories) into her own themes.  She likes to ponder and explore things like symbols, statues, architecture and song that are involved in storytelling. In fact, colors have always held an interest for her, as she experienced synesthesia as a child, and when she heard music, she saw it in colors; when she saw colors, she heard their music.

Although she was born in Michigan, she grew up at the foot of the Wasatch mountains in Utah, where she learned to fish at age eight on opening day of fishing season.  Mountains were always there, an anchor on the East, a map that kept her centered. Streams necklaced them, splashing the world clean, quenching thirst with their flow. Wherever she lived, she searched for mountains, to breathe their symbols and to feel their reassuring comfort.

Works in progress include an historical fiction novel set in Arizona’s Superstition Mountains (Song of Seven Thunders), a sequel to Pooka, and a published anthology of top-rated favorites from FunGrandmaStories.com. Watch for them!