Pearl Kirkby was one of those kids who was "born with a pencil in one hand and a notepad in the other!" She began writing (and illustrating) stories the moment she learned how to print her name.Born in 1954, in Natchez, Mississippi, Pearl and her sister were, for the most part, raised in Florida, with some years filled in by travel (thanks to their father's career) to New Orleans, Los Angeles, Santiago de Chile (South America) and Franklin, a small town in North Carolina. The differences in cultures, traditions and lifestyles to which they were exposed stayed with her throughout both childhood and adulthood and are, at times, reflected in her writing.Although they weren't the last, her first heroes were her sister, her mother and her father. Even if much poetic license has been taken, many of characters in her first books are styled after these three, deep, most important people in her life. According to her mother's often exasperated venting, Pearl had a vivid imagination, a morbid sense of fascination and was often "prone to exaggeration and facetiousness". If you had the opportunity to read them, this would likely be proven through the notebooks, dream journals and diaries filled with not only the daily course of things, but also with short stories and daydreams, which she has kept throughout life. Although many of these books were lost during the course of her lifetime, she has been able to reproduce much of their content, time after duplicate time...usually with no small amount of embellishment!The ideas behind Einstein's Theory of Relativity and Feynman's Sum Over History...any subject regarding time and space, in other words...always fascinated her. The differences and even similarities in cultural religious beliefs and corresponding "miracles and gifts", near death and out of body experiences and (due to her own experiences of seeing strange things in the night skies) the possibility of "life beyond" all led to an obsessive search for knowledge...and also caused many difficulties in her youth from her many 'embarrassing questions'.Drawing on that curiosity led her to incorporating such notions into the short story, "Folded Dreams", which got its beginnings in a college English Lit class, where it was submitted into competition against her classmates' stories...and her professor's. The story won, hands down, including the final vote cast by the professor, herself.Fast forward to retirement: Pearl's dream of becoming a published writer was finally within her grasp and so it was, with husband, friends and family urging her onward, that Folded Dreams - the Beginning" became her first published work.The rest, as they say, is history._________Works in Progress: Folded Dreams - The Novel Waking Up Dead Mama Always Said... (3 book series)