Meet Yvona Fast – One of the Writing Magic Society Members

Welcome to the Writing Magic Society! It’s where I found all of my current critique partners.
I couldn’t move forward as a writer without them.
​Six of us meet every Friday, and now I’m excited to introduce them to you. 
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​​                                                                               Part 1 – Meet Yvona Fast
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The best way to meet Yvona is to visit her website.  This is a photo of the Adirondack Mountains. They’re in northern New York. Yvona calls them home and it’s true . . . Words are her World.
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Three Continents – Most of us have only lived in North America, but Yvona has lived on two other continents, Europe and Asia.  

She was born in Poland and lived in Warsaw until she finished first grade. Can you find Poland on the map? It’s in northern Europe.

Yvona and her mother moved to Tel Aviv, then later to Haifa. They’re both big cities in Israel. Can you find it on the map? If you have trouble, find Egypt in northern Africa, then go east. Look for a tiny country. That’s Israel. It’s part of the Middle East, and Asia too.
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​By fourth grade, Yvona moved again. This time she and her mom moved across the Atlantic Ocean, all the way west to Chicago, Illinois. Can you find Illinois on the map? It’s in the United States, and that’s part of North America.

Yvona was only ten, but she’d lived in three countries, on three different continents. She spoke three different languages. Thank goodness words are her life! I can’t imagine doing all those things, by the time I turned ten.

Yvona is also a first-generation immigrant. My family has been in the United States forever. I don’t know when they arrived, probably generations ago. They came to the United States from England, and Germany. They’re both countries in Europe. 
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Librarian – Yvona was always a reader. She brought home stacks of books every week as a child. No one made her – she wanted to. When she’d read everything in the children’s room, her mother signed a form so Yvona could get books from the adult section.
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Guess what career she picked?! A librarian. Would you believe Yvona has worked in public libraries, the academic ones at universities, and in prison libraries too? She’s seen the world from so many different points of view.

​Missionary – Yvona’s library skills led her into missionary work in Eastern Europe. She spent five years setting up libraries for seminaries and Bible colleges. It’s also where she sold her first magazine article, to the editors at Christian Single. Once she started, Yvona found new things she wanted to write about. 

Neurodiversity – Yvona didn’t discover this until she did a search for someone at the library. They were looking for books about learning disabilities in math, but not in language arts. She was surprised – there were people like her, who faced the same problems. It’s lovely to discover you’re not alone. That there are people who understand you and how you process the world.

When I was a kid, no one knew about learning disabilities. It was the same for Yvona. She discovered she was neurodiverse and hyperlexic as an adult. That means the language and analytical left side of her brain are more developed than her visual and motor right side. Yvona needs words to understand something new. Seeing it isn’t enough. It has to be put into words.
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I was curious about neurodiverse and hyperlexic so I googled them. Neurodiverse means showing autistic or other neurological patterns of thought or behavior. They aren’t the patterns most people have. Hyperlexia means having an exceptional reading ability at a really young age. What’s missing, age-appropriate speech and language skills. What I find interesting is how good Yvona is with words. I can’t write poetry, and it comes to her naturally, effortlessly. It’s a great silver lining!

What Inspires Yvona – The world around her! She lives in the mountains of northern New York. Her favorite place – outside. In the summer she’s swimming and paddling a canoe. In winter you’ll find her cross-country skiing and snowshoeing.
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When Yvona’s inside, she’s cooking and writing. Why does she write? She has to. The words come, and she has to put them down. It’s her gift, her talent.

                               Meet Yvona and her Books:
 

​This is the first one, but it’s still at the top of her Amazon titles. Her neurodiversity inspired her to write it. The title: Employment for Individuals with Asperger Syndrome or Non-Verbal Learning Disability. Yvona has been speaking to parents and teachers about learning disabilities and autism spectrum disorders ever since her book came out in 2004. 




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​​This is Yvona’s second book, My Nine Lives: A Memoir. It came out in 2011, and it was inspired by her mother’s memories as a Holocaust survivor. Yvona co-authored it with her mother. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to put memories like this together, for both of them.

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​This book started with Yvona’s love of food and cooking. She’s been writing a weekly column for her local newspaper since 2005. I’m not surprised that it turned into her third book, Garden Gourmet: Fresh & Fabulous Meals from your Garden, CSA or Farmers’ Market. Check out this book, and you’ll find 300 recipes. Best of all they’re grouped by the season. It’s spring now . . .  I wonder what Yvona would suggest for dinner tonight.

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Yvona has published two poetry chapbooks that are out of print, at least on Amazon. Their titles – Different from 2017 and Adirondack Blue Seasons from 2018. BTW – a chapbook is a small paperback booklet filled with poems or works of fiction.

But there’s good news, I found this on Amazon – Adirondack Seasons Haiku. It came out in 2020, and it started life as a Haiku Challenge. I love reading the back story and discovering how a book was born.

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Good in the Midst of Evil came out in 2022. Yvona co-authored this one with her mother. It’s the amazing story of how her mother changed names and identities repeatedly during the Holocaust, to survive. She also changed religion. Dana Fast was born Jewish, but she learned to present herself as a Catholic, to stay alive.

Her mother’s message – it’s unfair to deny the Poles their acts of heroism. They risked their lives, and their families to help her. Thanks to them Dana found good in the midst of evil, and she lived to tell.
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I loved Dana and Yvona’s book so much I posted a review on Amazon, Goodreads, and Barnes and Noble.  You can read it for yourself!

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This is Yvona’s newest book, Loon Summer. Each spread starts with one of her poems. Then it adds in the perfect photo to illustrate it. The spread ends with a fun science fact about loons. They’re fascinating, especially the way they talk to each other!

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​This book surprised me. Yvona never mentioned it. I stumbled across it on Amazon. Autumn Dance came to life because of The Autumn Chapbook Challenge. I’m glad Yvona took it and turned it into this book she published in March of 2023.

Her poems are incredible, and they just come! I’d rather pull my hair out than try to write poetry. When Yvona brings her poems to our critique group, we try to help her tweak them. Her words, are that good!

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                                           Learn More at . . .
yvonafast.com
https://www.adirondackalmanack.com/2021/08/creative-adirondacks-writer-yvona-fast.html

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Map: By The original was edited by Andrew c to include Nova Scotia, PEI, Bahamas, and scale key.It was originally uploaded to the English Wikipedia with the same title by Wapcaplet:20:57, 9 October 2005 . . Dbenbenn . . 959x593 (339217 bytes) (fix South Carolina label)20:27, 9 October 2005 . . Dbenbenn . . 959x593 (339227 bytes) (typo, Massachussetts -> Massachusetts)19:01, 9 October 2005 . . Dbenbenn . . 959x593 (371653 bytes) (crop, and remove some shapes (rivers, highways, capitals, lakes) that didn't display anyway)13:18, 23 September 2005 . . Ed g2s . . 990x855 (978668 bytes) (fix (removed <image /> tag))23:48, 23 September 2004 . . Wapcaplet . . 0x0 (978926 bytes) (SVG map of the United States. Created by Wapcaplet. {{GFDL} }) - see below, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=362916

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