An Adventure in the LovinLands

Dr. Brandis Hartsell is a retired marine biologist and educator. As a young student, she learned about the plight of wolves and whales and wrote many, many letters demanding protections for endangered organisms before beginning her career as a marine biologist and science educator. Throughout her young adulthood, her compassion for living things and the impulse to hug them grew stronger. She began a long-lived hobby in which she created her own patterns for a huge collection of stuffed animals, all of which could be hugged whenever the urge struck. Some of them were representations of real creatures. But others were beasts with no comparison in real life. These were the imaginative creations that became the characters for a story that gave them their own community and social connections and their own adventure. These friendly and huggable beasts were rendered from actual photos and endowed with all the love and happiness Brandis felt as she created them.