Today we’d like to introduce you to Sharon Frances
Hi Sharon, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
As a poet, author, and speaker, I have done many things, all of which inspired me to write about children and youth surviving difficult times. I have been a breast cancer survivor since 2018, and a depression, panic and anxiety survivor since childhood. For six years, I was a bilingual K-8 teacher in California and Texas. Then for 16 years, I was a teacher educator in Arizona and California, specializing in language arts, visual arts integration, social justice, and bilingual education. During my time as a professor, I trained in the Human Rights Campaign’s Welcoming Schools Program and became a gender diversity and LGBTQ inclusion specialist in K-12 schools. After my father died from brain cancer and I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018, I created a non-profit project, Well Beings Studio, to support families impacted by cancer through literature and the arts. During that time, I was an author and self-publisher of four children’s literature books, and donated over 6,000 copies to families, cancer support organizations, hospitals, libraries and schools.
I now focus on writing and art-making, as a poet/author. I also enjoy presenting workshops and talks focused on the themes and creative processes I focus on in my books. I write from personal experience with a twist of magical realism, raw emotion, adventure, and a passion for inclusion and social justice. The young teen characters living in my brain are girls and LGBTQ+ kids coming of age, learning to empower themselves through difficult times.
I am a member of the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and Authors Against Book Bans.
I am excited about my new Art for Democracy series, which I feature on my social media. These linocut ink prints promote the struggle for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility; freedom of speech, human rights, mental health, and the promotion of social welfare, education and the environment.
On April 25, 2025, I will indie-publish my first novel, Ash & Feather: told in poetry and illustrated with my linocut prints. It is about a young teen who is both girl and bird. She the power of her imagination and confidence to take flight from the ashes of her grief, gaining for the first time a sense of her own power.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I was in my mid-40s when I was diagnosed with Stage IIIA invasive lobular carcinoma, ER/PR+, which meant that
the cancer had moved from the ducts to the lobes of my breast, grown into sheaths that created a lump, and then spread into the lymph nodes and lymph system of my body. I was one stage away from metastasis to my bones and organs. The cancer fed on my estrogen and progesterone, so my treatment included many strategies to block
these hormones. As of this writing, I have been disease-free for 6.5 years, but in some ways it feels like yesterday. During breast cancer, my body metabolized a sharp clarity about healing myself, about living through art and words, about prioritizing myself for the first time. Staring at the brokenness of my life, I began to piece together
a tenderness and love for myself I didn’t know existed in me. I used poetry and art-making to create new wholes, new worlds, and a new life. While I had lost a pre-cancer body, the liveliness of my 40s, my energy and
drive, my body is capable now of more than ever before. Cancer had left me cut, carved, burned and poisoned. It was one hell of a year. But like the Japanese art of Kintsugi (repairing broken pottery by filling the cracks with gold), I repaired myself. It was glorious, liberating, devastating, terrifying. And it was all mine. Since then, I have struggled with the effects of my cancer medication to block the estrogen: daily depression, fatigue and pain. I deal with them through medication, movement, meditation and making. Although overwhelming at times, creating and thriving through struggle is an empowering process. I allow all the emotions and twists and turns to happen, experiencing everything will such strong appreciation as I go.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
As a poet and visual artist, I believe in being creative for myself, rather than for approval, likes/shares, or fitting in to some professional commercial standard. At its core, my creativity is a mental health practice. I write and make art to process my feelings, to understand myself and hear myself (which fulfills a core need for each of us to be seen.) Creativity builds my confidence, provides me with deep modes of self care, connecting me to the moment, to myself and others. Through this process, I find I have the fortitude to deal with the world, hardships, injustices using similar processes to those in my creative practice (such as problem-solving and perspective-taking).
I am most proud of my first novel, which comes out at the end of April 2025. It is a seven year project which began as a set of journal entries, then became a play and a podcast, before finding its way to the finished novel-in-verse form.
Ash & Feather is young teen lit, although really is for everyone who loves a gentle, strong empowerment story full of magical realism.
When fourteen-year-old Phoenix learns of her parent, Eagle’s cancer diagnosis, her shoulder blades start to itch. It’s the end of summer vacation, eighth grade starts next week, and Phoenix’s world collapses. Every hall she runs down, every room she hides in, Phoenix feels herself changing, growing wings while Eagle may be dying. She builds a new nest from the comfort of grandparent Duck, counselor Hen, and sweetheart Ing. But cancer is like a coyote howling in the hills waiting for Phoenix to land so it can destroy everything. If she is to rise from the ashes of this uncertain world– one of surgery and medicine, classes and teachers–Phoenix must learn to feel everything, and become the bird she always imagined.
Please find some questions and answers to learn more about Ash & Feather!
Ash & Feather focuses on a family impacted by cancer. How do you talk to children, tweens and teens about cancer?
The book addresses cancer in an approachable way by integrating it into the life of a family, intentionally unshaming and demystifying talking about a life threatening disease without being overwhelming. The main character, Phoenix, grapples with both her parent’s diagnosis and treatment and her own questions about grief and death, as she lives her early teen life: cooking, playing, learning at school, taking walks. Even though it is hard, it is important to have age-appropriate conversations about cancer with young people. Talking through what happens during cancer and the emotions your child might have will help your children feel safe and connected to you. Encourage young people to share their questions, worries and thoughts. Engage in activities like role play, reading books, creating a feelings collage, going on a walk, laughing and playing together to help build a safe environment to process cancer and be a family together. While battling breast cancer, I developed a series of online resources for families to use during their own struggles: https://www.wellbeings.studio/talk-about-cancer
Why does Phoenix see herself and those she loves as birds? Is she really both a human and a bird?
I hesitate to respond with certainty that Phoenix imagines herself as part bird or that she IS part bird. I want to leave that open to the reader, for them to decide based on what they need from the story. Definitely, Phoenix has a strong attraction to animals, and birds, in particular. Birds make her feel free, hopeful, and full of possibility. She also loves birds’ sense of escape and adventure. When her emotions are high, whether out of fear, anger, excitement, or joy, Phoenix accesses the parts of herself that are bird-like. She channels bird qualities to process her emotions and engage with the world. Across time and space in literature and folklore, there are many examples of relationships between humans and animals, as companions, familiars, spirit animals, and hybrid human-animals. All of these relationships would be fun to explore after reading Ash & Feather to prompt further reflection.
Why was it important for you to portray Phoenix’s queer relationship with her best friend Ing?
I’m a member of the LGBTQ+ community and a passionate advocate for queer kids and young adults. I purposefully wrote Phoenix’s parents without gender, and explored Phoenix’s queer attraction to her friend Ing, because I believe in the power of representation. I wish more LGBTQ+ literature had been available to me when I was a young person. Phoenix and Ing fall in love because of their unique connection as birds, and by sharing special experiences together: nature walks, crafts, games, poems. Their physical attraction (touch, a kiss) is an emergent characteristic of their close relationship without emphasis on detailed sexual encounters, which I believe is appropriate for an upper elementary/middle grade readership. I hope telling Phoenix and Ing’s story will help queer youth understand themselves, normalize queer experiences, and make them relatable to all readers.
Tell us about Phoenix’s family. How do you define family, and why is the way you portray family important to you?
I define family as the people who live together or are close to one another, take care of and love each other. There are many ways to be a family, including mixed generation families, queer families, interfaith families, adopted and foster families, multilingual families, single parent families, mixed status families, and families with step parents. In Ash & Feather, Phoenix lives with her parent and grandparent. She comments at one point that she wasn’t used to seeing her family dynamic represented in popular culture. She also struggles with communication in her family, gets frustrated, and repairs connections over time. Increasing representation of diverse families and how they navigate adversity is important in many ways. Readers can learn to appreciate and empathize with different points of view. Talking about diversity can increase our capacity to communicate about previously stigmatized and silenced ways of being in the world.
Hen, the counselor, plays an important role for Phoenix during her parent’s cancer. Can you tell us more about why you included this character?
Ash & Feather is a journey of self healing. The main character Phoenix, an early teen, self soothes through her own creative coping skills and with processing strategies mostly from her middle school counselor, Hen. When I write poems with Phoenix and Hen, I can show how these coping and processing activities work in real time. The reader can live through them, as they balance in a yoga pose or use “sometimes, always, never” to respond to statements about difficult emotions and topics. From my own personal struggles with depression, anxiety, and panic during family issues and cancer, as well as through my research on mental health, I identified many strategies that Phoenix encounters in the book.
Why is Ash & Feather an important book to support the mental health of tweens and teens?
I am very interested in writing adolescent stories of healing because I struggled so much as a tween and teen with challenging family situations, such as parental cancer, divorce, emotional abuse and alcoholism, as well as my own depression and body dysmorphia. I also started questioning my sexuality in high school and did not have any resources for any of these issues to help me, including for my psychological, social and emotional well-being. Self-healing is essential for early adolescents as they encounter real world problems and need positive, creative strategies to help them process what they are learning and feeling. I wanted to write not only a book about creativity and healing, but also a tool for readers to use in their daily lives. There are many activities in the back of the book that promote emotional well-being, as suggested by social workers, educators and doctors.
Most importantly, Phoenix is a strong character whose inner voice and sense-of-self guide her, confidently allowing her love for birds and flight to influence her identity. I want my characters to be a guide for the reader as they learn to trust their own voices and bodies during difficult times. I hope reading my stories will be a wellness experience of struggle and joy, with strategies for readers to reference in their daily lives.
Tell us about the illustrations in Ash & Feather. Why did you use the relief print-making style?
I decided that each of my novels-in-verse will include both poetry and illustrations. I characterize my poetry as raw, organic, emotional, and speaking from a confident inner voice. My illustrations are linocut relief printmaking. The results are textured images with stark contrasts that look both simple and complex at once. The prints are a little “rough around the edges” just like life. Pairing poetry and relief prints felt natural to me. They both focus on the essence of the moment, with spontaneous energy and meaning in between the spaces. I also love that poetry and printmaking are accessible mediums for most people, and I love to teach people how to create in both!
The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you and any important lessons or epiphanies you can share with us?
COVID-19 has been with us for five years this spring. I have learned that as a community, we have great strength and resilience to connect, mourn, and heal. Although this tragedy has impacted us, traumatized us, and drained us, it has defined us in radical ways: treating COVID and getting essential needs met revealed deep inequities. The loss of life and society revealed our collective creativity and boldness to make change. Living through COVID has pushed us to create the strongest civil rights struggles this modern world has ever seen. I am proud to participate in envisioning a world after COVID, one that places people, animals and the environment over profit. A better world in which we can all be healthy and thrive.
Pricing:
- 14.95
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.sharonjoyfrances.com
- Instagram: @sharonfrancesme
- Facebook: @sharon.frances2020
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SharonFrances
- Other: https://bit.ly/AshFeatherPreOrder
Image Credits
All images are by Sharon Frances, except for my headshot (me by the bridge, black and white photo: Please attribute to Melzie Photography, 2024.)
