Destiny at Oak Valley

Jeffree Wyn Itrich began telling stories as soon as she could speak and began putting them down on paper when she learned to write. A child with an active imagination (maybe even too active) she saw stories all around her. She was mesmerized by fairy tales because in truth they seemed quite real. For years she was sure that elves lived in her family’s garden and that if she paid just a bit more attention that she would see fairies flitting around in the starlight. One day her mother, Joyce Sapp, showed her a blank book given to her by her parents when she was a young girl. Young Joyce wrote poetry and stories that inspired her daughter. Jeffree loved her mother’s book and knew that she wanted, no, needed to write down her stories in a book too. She was 10 or 11 when her mother gave her the first of many blank books. She has been writing ever since. In the late 1980s Jeffree studied journalism at UC Berkeley and began writing articles on every topic from food to people profiles to feature stories. Being the inquisitive type she found wonder in how people lived their lives, what they did to make life sparkle, to make it worth living. In 1987 North Point Press published her non-fiction book, The Art of Accompaniment, which was later reprinted by Border Books, retitled Spice It Up. Non-fiction writing fulfilled one part of her but deep inside, in that place where the heart rules, she knew she had her own fiction stories to tell. She sensed that she wasn’t living her life to its fullest, for its intended purpose, if she didn’t write and publish the tales. It wasn’t until she participated in a balloon rally in southeastern New Mexico that the story of Destiny at Oak Valley came to fruition. Some stories simply cry out to be told; this is one of them.