The Magic of 'Dragon's Breath': The Inspirational Influence of Dr. Dawn Menge"

Listen to today's episode, "The Magic of 'Dragon's Breath': The Inspirational Influence of Dr. Dawn Menge" as Special Education Teacher,  professor, and Children's Book Author, Dr. Dawn Menge joins Dori Durbin. Dawn shares:

• The Queen Vernita Educational Series
• Empowering Kids With Workability
• "Dragon's Breath"
• Personal Pain Redirected Into Book
• Reading from "Dragon's Breath"
• Long Distance Class Visits
• Why Amazon Reviews Matter
• Future Books in the Series
• Overcoming Imposter Syndrome
• Where to find Dawn and Her Books

Did you love this episode? Discover more here:
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More about Dawn:
Dr. Dawn Menge has won seventy International awards as the published author of the Queen Vernita's Educational Series and Dragon's Breath, including the Special Recognition Champion Award from Conquering Disabilties with Film, Best Written Word from Miracle Makers Film, Hollywood Dreams Film and International Author Boss Award from Power Conversations Magazine. Her published works also include: THE SIX FEDERAL INDIVIDUAL EDUCATION PLAN GOALS AND THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THEIR IMPLEMENTATION IN PREPARING FOR TRANSITION.

Dr. Dawn Menge has a PHD in Education. She specializes in Curriculum and Instruction. She also holds a Master's and a Clear Credential in Moderate/Severe Disabilities and a Bachelor's Degree in Human Development. Dr. Dawn Menge has been teaching students with severe cognitive delays for over twenty years, and mentors/lectures graduate students.

Dr. Dawn Menge is the mother of three, and the grandmother of six beautiful grandchildren.

I love reading to children and seeing their eyes light up as they make connections with the characters and storylines. 

Find Dawn's Book:
https://www.rushmorepress.com/menge-events

Follow Dawn:
http://www.facebook.com/dawn.menge1
http://www.instagram.com/dawnmenge
http://www.twitter.com/queenvernitasvisitors

More about Dori Durbin:
Dori Durbin is a Christian wife, mom, author, illustrator, and a kids’ book coach who after experiencing a life-changing illness, quickly switched gears to follow her dream. She creates kids’ books to provide a fun and safe passageway for kids and parents to dig deeper and experience empowered lives. Dori also coaches non-fiction authors and aspiring authors to “kid-size” their content into informational and engaging kids’ books!
 
Buy Dori's Kids' Books:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Dori-Durbin/author/B087BFC2KZ

Follow Dori
http://instagram.com/dori_durbin
http://www.doridurbin.com
http://www.facebook.com/dori_durbin

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:56 The Queen Vernita Educational Series
• 5:58 Empowering Kids With Workability
• 11:27 "Dragon's Breath"
• 13:35 Personal Pain Redirected Into Book
• 17:55 Reading from "Dragon's Breath"
• 20:35 Long Distance Class Visits
• 24:21 Why Amazon Reviews Matter
• 26:00 Future Books in the Series
• 31:14 Overcoming Imposter Syndrome
• 33:30 Where to find Dawn and Her Books

Transcript

[00:00:50.990] - Dori Durbin

Hello and welcome to The Power of Kids Books, where we believe books are a catalyst to inspire and empower change. I'm your host, Dori Durbin. You know that I believe that children's books are an important component of literacy, socially, emotional, and creative development in children's lives. That goes without saying. Our guest today, though, is a leading authority in children's literature. She has a PhD in education and years of experience helping children with cognitive delays. She has a passion for education and a commitment for fostering a love of learning, and she'll be sharing her book, Dragon's Breath and others with us as well. So, welcome, Dr. Dawn Menge.

[00:01:32.190] - Dr Dawn Menge

Hi, good morning. I love that intro.

[00:01:37.870] - Dori Durbin

It is all true. And you have so many accolades on your bio. It's very impressive, and including 70 international awards and awards from films. So I just need to know, how did your background come into your authorship now and what are all these awards?

[00:01:57.130] - Dr Dawn Menge

Well, as you said, I teach students with severe cognitive delays. I've been doing that for over 25 years now. So when I was getting my credential way back when, one of my assignments in my math class was to create a math book. So that's actually where my stories began. It's called Queen Vernita Series, and it was named after one of my students. Her name was Victoria. And the book is based on the calendar skills, days of the weeks, months of the years, and each page has a new person with the queen, and they're doing seven activities. So when I first wrote the book, I actually had it written for my students, and we actually did these little skits, and we went around to the elementary schools, and I would go back the next day and explain the disabilities or the behaviors, whatever questions they had. So we did that for about three years. I got a grant from Cal Poly. So I was getting divorced and my children were raised and I was already teaching, so I was like, what am I going to do next? So I decided to publish the book. I named it after my grandmother, who's an astute businesswoman, and put all the children in the family in the book because I knew that they wouldn't complain, like, they wouldn't even pay attention to it.

[00:03:11.300] - Dr Dawn Menge

And so this is my son Jeremy, and he's picking Sunflowers. But I got first place in the EB Awards, which is a self publishing award out of Colorado. And then I started getting interviews, and they were asking me, well, what book is next? And I hadn't planned on doing anything next. So that's kind of where the series started from, because I love to travel, so I started writing books about my traveling. And I also started my PhD at that time. So that's what I did after my children were out of the home and I was getting divorced. And so it just kind of all went from there. And now I have 13 published.

[00:03:49.210] - Dori Durbin

That's incredible. And I don't know that people really understand, unless they've written a book, the amount of time and energy that goes into crafting books and trying to find the right words and still try to appeal to kids and parents and include everything that you want, it's quite a process. How did you choose what your next book would be?

[00:04:11.230] - Dr Dawn Menge

Well, for the Queen Vernita, it started with just my traveling. So where do I run about? So I actually wrote one on Alaska. I've been there three times. I'm going again this July. So I wrote the one on Alaska has glaciers and eagles and all sorts. This one is third to fourth grade, and my books run pre K to 6th grade. So your child can actually grow up reading my books. And then the next one I did, I wrote with my brother. He's an astronomer. JPL so we wrote a book together about astronomy. And it includes this is when I started including my students who have disabilities, and I started with down syndrome and cerebral palsy. This is my friend. She was my assistant in my classroom about 20 years. She has an adoptive son and he has cerebral palsy. So we talked just a little bit about it. But what I like to accentuate is that the children are learning about things. This one is learning about astronomy, but he has a disability. So we talk just a little bit about the disability. But mostly we focus on he's learning, he's having fun, he's enjoying his life.

[00:05:21.670] - Dr Dawn Menge

And that's what we like to focus on with the book. So I have down syndrome, cerebral palsy, autism, visual impairments. I have about ten disabilities within my book, my book. And so we just go from there.

[00:05:38.430] - Dori Durbin

It's amazing. So each book has at least one disability, it sounds like.

[00:05:42.560] - Dr Dawn Menge

Not each book. I think I have about five that have disabilities in them, and then the rest they don't.

[00:05:49.510] - Dori Durbin

I love how you have them actively doing something that every child would be interested in and succeeding, which is, again, very empowering.

[00:05:58.920] - Dr Dawn Menge

Yes. I teach 9th through 12th grade, and we do workability, which is our students go into the community. Right now they're working at CVS and Walgreens, and my assistant goes with them and they sort the shelves and put price tags on, and they're actually getting paid to do that. So they're learning how to ride the community bus. They're learning how to earn money, and they really love getting their checks, and then they're learning how to budget their money. And then we go out. I live in a small mountain community that I actually grew up in, and so the mountain hardware up here has been supporting my students for it has to be 16 years now. So they give us envelopes to put stamps on, or sometimes we put the price tags on like hats or whatever they have. Lately we've been doing adding the receipts for the donations. And so my students are using calculators and learning to add everything up. And then they give us a movie card every month. So we go to the movies. And so that's their reward for they're also getting paid for it, but the whole class gets to go to the movies with the movie card.

[00:07:01.740] - Dr Dawn Menge

So there's lots of different things to do. So if anyone's listening and they have a business and they have something that their local students could do, they could go to the high school or any adult center and contact them, and they can have those students or clients do things for their business. So I'm actually on the board of it's called Hindi's Libraries and it's from the East Coast. And they donate books to lots of organizations all over the world, but they also utilize their local adult center and they put the stickers on the books. So there's lots of things you can do if you have a business and you need just a little bit of that kind of help, contact the local area and see what they have, people that can help you.

[00:07:51.050] - Dori Durbin

That's a great idea. And really probably something that's really underutilized, right?

[00:07:56.300] - Dr Dawn Menge

Yeah. Well, a lot of people don't know yeah. And they don't know that the adults or the students can get paid for it. And so that also is a good incentive for the clients.

[00:08:08.980] - Dori Durbin

That's awesome. Now you have this series, but you also have your other series. Do you want to talk about that series a little bit?

[00:08:16.660] - Dr Dawn Menge

Yeah. First, I'll talk about two of the disabilities I also have in I have two books on Kona Hawai because I have a friend I grew up with and he moved to Kona. He married a woman who grew up in Kona. So I spent a lot of time there. And in this book I have two there there are two forms of autism. But Ireland is making lays for her classmates and mom is helping and she's explaining to the queen why she needs help, her muscle issues and all of that. She's explaining that. And then Connor was my student and he is at the Volcanic National Park with his dad and the queen, and he uses a communication device. So he's explaining to the queen what his device is for and he's talking to her. So the students who are reading this are learning about the Volcanic National Park. They're seeing a child with autism and learning about his iPad. So when they see someone on campus who has a phone or an iPad and they're using it to communicate, they don't get upset because why does that person get to have their iPad or their phone and we don't?

[00:09:21.640] - Dr Dawn Menge

No, they're using it to communicate, and then they know to address that when they're trying to talk to them that this is what they're using. But yes, I have also so in Queen Bernitas, she has a land. It's called the Land of Quails. And in the land, there's another kingdom. It has Queen giggles and King Teddy Bear. And this is actually based on something that happened to me. Someone was bothering me in my home because she was jealous of something. And so to help cope with what had happened to me, I wrote a book about it, and she called me a dragon slayer. So there's a dragon this person is a dragon, and she's helping the king. She thinks she's telling the king that she's helping him with the crops and all of this. And then she meets the queen, and then she gets upset. She gets jealous because the king loves the queen. So she starts blowing black smoke on all the crops. And she's standing there and this is something I discuss with the children, is she's standing there with the king and the villagers, and everyone's upset because all these bad things are happening.

[00:10:27.420] - Dr Dawn Menge

And she's standing there like, oh, I don't know what's going on, but she's actually the one doing it. And because she's not strong enough to blow fire and burn things up, she's just blowing this black smoke that is killing the crops because they're not getting the sunshine. So when the king is wandering around trying to just in distress, trying to figure out what the heck is going on, he catches the dragon blowing the black smoke. So then he banishes her from the kingdom because it's not okay to hurt your friends and it's not okay to lie that you're doing it. And so this book is read all over the world. Children love it, but the one thing that they always try to do is they try to make the dragon a good dragon. Like, oh, she didn't mean to hurt anybody. She didn't really mean it. But I always point out that page, she's watching what's happening. She's watching that it's destroying the crops and hurting the villagers. So she does know. She knows she's hurting people. And that's something that we all have to learn, and it's really hard to learn, is that people do things on purpose.

[00:11:27.060] - Dr Dawn Menge

They do. And you have to acknowledge that they are doing it on purpose and they know it's hurting you and that maybe that person really isn't your friend, and that sometimes you can't have people in your life who are doing that. And so that's one of the just a little lessons in here. But everybody loves the book. It's called Dragon's Breath. And in the fall, by the fall, I'm going to have the second book out. It's called Precious. The baby dragon. So the king has banished the bad dragon, and the king and queen live happily ever after. And they're walking down the beach and they go into a cave and they find a dragon egg. So they decide to raise this baby dragon. So the dragon doesn't know how to blow fire or to fly because the dragon is the only dragon in the kingdom. So she's walking along and she accidentally falls inside a volcano. And she's scared, so she's trying to get out, so she's learning how to fly. And then she starts blowing like the caldera has this little fire and smoke coming up. So she starts doing this, and then she starts breathing fire, and she's like, oh, gosh, now I know.

[00:12:34.470] - Dr Dawn Menge

So she learned how to fly and breathe fire by accidentally falling in the volcano. And she didn't get hurt. It wasn't an active volcano. So then she surprises the king and queen and flies up, and they're waking up in the morning, and there she is flying around. So they make her the night. She's precious the night. And she starts helping the king and the kingdom by protecting them. And then she saves the queen from falling into this caldera. And they decide that she needs they're going to go around to the different kingdoms and find more dragons for her so she can have her own family and have a dragon family. So that's going to be the next book, and it's a happy book, and then we're going to build more books after that.

[00:13:18.270] - Dori Durbin

That sounds adorable. Absolutely adorable.

[00:13:21.970] - Dr Dawn Menge

Thank you. I'm excited.

[00:13:25.010] - Dori Durbin

Let me ask you this. So what took your brain from a traveling series to a dragon series?

[00:13:35.570] - Dr Dawn Menge

It's just because somebody was bothering me in my home for like three and a half years, and I ended up having to sell my home. So my assistant, she was helping me try to process it, and she was helping me through it because it was very scary and they were vandalizing my house and gaslighting me and everything. So we actually were sitting in the police station with the detective, and he told us exactly who was doing it because we couldn't catch the person. So the detective told us, yes, it's this person. And so my friend and I, we were going to Vegas for the weekend, and on the way to Vegas, we created this book together, and so there's a dragon because she called me a dragon slayer. So it's like, okay, so there's a dragon. And then the king and queen, of course, because it's in the land of Quails and it's part of the queen Bernita series. And so she has this whole land. So now she has another kingdom inside the land and it kind of just flowed. But we talked it over and wrote and wrote it as we were driving.

[00:14:36.130] - Dr Dawn Menge

So as soon as I got there, I wrote it all down. And then it did take me a couple of years to publish it because things kind of continued after that and so it took me a little while and now everything is in control.

[00:14:49.760] - Dori Durbin

We'll say, I love that that's become a success story. You literally took something that was painful and shifted it over into something that was powerful for other people too. Kudos to you to that. That's a huge deal.

[00:15:06.050] - Dr Dawn Menge

Thank you. I think it's the teacher in me and it was a good way for me to express myself because I wasn't able to stop it. I had to sell my home and so I had to have a way to process it all in a positive way for myself. And so this is what I was able to do. And it's very popular with the children and it's being read all over the world.

[00:15:33.610] - Dori Durbin

So your characters from your first series, I was thinking about the kids that were in that in each of the books. Do they know that they're in them?

[00:15:44.990] - Dr Dawn Menge

My students that are in them are low functioning, so they're not aware of it, but the parents are. Parents all know all that, but everybody in my books because each book is based on the calendar skills. So there's twelve friends and everybody in the book. There are people in my life, so I always ask them, do you want to be in the book? Is it okay? So either their children are in the books or they're in the books. And the one thing that kind of surprised me was like the first one I did, we did all the kids in the family and I put my father in there who had passed away, but the adults wanted to be in the books and I was really surprised about that. So I love putting in my friends and my family and all of our they're all real life adventures. And so this one I wrote, the one on Tucson. I actually had a friend that I grew up with and he had moved to Tucson and so when I started writing the books, he worked at the university there, so I would go there. They have a huge book festival there.

[00:16:46.370] - Dr Dawn Menge

Like 10,000 people go to it. So I would go every year. I live in California, so I would drive there, go every year. And he would set me up in like a bed and breakfast or something because he does web design. And so I actually met this really neat lady at a bed and breakfast there. If anybody wants to go to Tucson, you need to go to see Hacienda Linda. And so this book is based inside of her. Hacienda and he helped me write it. He's my co author and he loves the desert. So this one is 6th grade, so it has a lot of information. But this is actually the COVID is a picture she took from her front porch and it's got a rainbow. It's beautiful. And so this is the one I'm going to go in October and we're going to do a book event. And I'm not sure what she has planned all, but it's going to be fun. And then she's going to give the books to each one of the people that come and visit.

[00:17:36.950] - Dori Durbin

What a cool trip and an opportunity for people to just see your books. That's really awesome.

[00:17:41.970] - Dr Dawn Menge

Yes, I'm excited about that.

[00:17:45.730] - Dori Durbin

Okay, let's go back to Dragon's Breath just for a minute. I would love to hear you read 30 seconds worth of that book.

[00:17:53.720] - Dr Dawn Menge

Okay, so you have to tell me when 30 seconds. Tell me when to stop.

[00:17:56.960] - Dori Durbin

Okay.

[00:17:59.610] - Dr Dawn Menge

Once upon a time, king Teddy Bear and Queen Giggles shared a magical life together. Filled with love and adventure, they traveled far and wide within their kingdom, sharing this magical life and writing down their tales to share with the schoolchildren of their kingdom. But sadly, it wasn't always so for them. The illustration is that they're sitting there with the villager children reading books. For many years, they lived separately in different worlds. There was an evilness that surrounded their kingdom that kept them apart and it filled their hearts with sadness. They both dreamed of one day being together and gaining their power back from the darkness that had entered their lives and kept them apart. Many years before, King Teddy Bear had befriended an aging dragon. This dragon pretended to be good and caring and she went around the kingdom of Quails telling stories to the villagers, convincing them to follow her. She told them she had magical powers and would help them grow bigger and better crops. The villagers were filled with hope from the dragon's promises and they all did what she said. King Teddy bear gave the dragon food and a nice cave to live in for all of her help with the villagers.

[00:19:04.690] - Dr Dawn Menge

He wanted his people to be successful and thrive. One day, King Teddy introduced the dragon to Queen Giggles. The king wanted the queen and the dragon to be friends as they were both trying to help the villagers. Queen Giggles tried to be friends with the dragon, but the dragon was very mean and said, I will never let the king know happiness unless he is with you. The dragon became angrier and angrier as she realized how much the king loved his queen. He was devoted to her and this made the dragon feel left out. And she was afraid he would stop making her so important in the kingdom of Quails.

[00:19:41.450] - Dori Durbin

Okay, so you left us on a cliffhanger, so we have to read the rest of it.

[00:19:45.290] - Dr Dawn Menge

You have to get the book.

[00:19:47.130] - Dori Durbin

I love it. And I see why it can work from very young to older kids as well. The way of the style of your writing.

[00:19:55.230] - Dr Dawn Menge

Yes, because everybody loves dragons, even adults love dragons. And the lesson is in there, but they're not really paying attention to the lesson part of it. They're reading the book and the adventure and it has a happy ending. So that's always good.

[00:20:13.810] - Dori Durbin

Now let's talk about going to classrooms because I think one of the pieces that people don't think about either is what is it like to be an author reading to a classroom full of kids and what are some of the comments that they make about your book? So do you have a particularly strong memory of going to a classroom and having a lot of feedback from them?

[00:20:39.690] - Dr Dawn Menge

Like I said, I live in the town that I grew up in, so they have the Young Authors conference. So every year I am the visiting author for it. We just did it a few weeks ago and it's really neat because the students, they have their own books published. So they'll come over and I'll read their books and sign their books and then they have already bought some of my books. So they come back every year and they say, well, what next do you have? What next do you have? So that's always really neat for me. And there was one little boy, I kept seeing him. I'm like, I saw you last year. So he won like three or four years in a row. So I saw him grow up from like kindergarten to like fourth grade. And so I put in one of my pictures that I have, I put them all together, his growing up. So that's really neat. And it's great that it's at the elementary school that I went to elementary school in. So that's really a good feeling to have all of that. And they're now going to put all my books into their libraries in all of the schools in this district.

[00:21:34.840] - Dr Dawn Menge

I did over COVID. I did a virtual reading with a classroom in Paraguay. And they were so excited and it was just really neat how excited they were. And so they were trying to talk to me in Spanish and then in English. And one little boy said that he was going to come to America so I could read him the story. And I said, well, if you come, I will read you a story. But I was actually reading on the thing and that was really neat. I have a teacher friend who uses my books. He teaches immigrants and they're adults, so he teaches them English, reading and writing, and then he teaches them to work in a factory so they can earn their own money. And so he's been sending me a lot of quotes. And there was a young man who came who was actually born on the savannah in Africa and they have the war. And so he came here. He didn't know how to read or write English or speak English. So he taught him with my book. And so his family is using it. His sister is using them to learn English.

[00:22:37.900] - Dr Dawn Menge

His daughter, who is six, is using them. And now he has families from China and Mexico. And so I just sent him a whole new set of books. And so all of these people who are coming here are learning how to read and write English and count. He told me that this page in my very first book, it's on Thanksgiving, and it's actually my daughter, and then all of the villagers are having Thanksgiving dinner. But he learned how to count by counting all the villagers in the book because it reminded him of his family in Africa. So he really connected to the picture and was able to learn to count. And it's just amazing to me when I started, like I said, it was an assignment in my math class to get my credential. I never thought that I would be publishing the book, that people would be reading the book, that I'd be doing book signings. I had one of our speech therapists, actually, she came from Africa, and she was going back, so I gave her some of my books. And her family, they were teachers, so they sent me pictures of children reading the books in classrooms in Africa, all over.

[00:23:51.290] - Dr Dawn Menge

I couldn't tell you exactly where because it was all over. And whenever I see those videos, I'm just like, that's just amazing to me that I never thought that would happen. So there's been a lot of really good experiences just spreading my books throughout the world.

[00:24:07.230] - Dori Durbin

I am thinking about the reach of that. That's amazing to be able to not only reach that many places, but to get the feedback, because it's so hard to even get a review on Amazon, much less feedback from Paraguay.

[00:24:21.890] - Dr Dawn Menge

And that's one thing I tell people when I'm doing it. If you're reading a book, leave a review. I know it's hard to go back and do that, but I was doing an interview, I think he was in St. Louis for a man who had a podcast. And so he said he was talking to his friend, and his friend had been checking out my books at the local library and reading them to her son. And she actually got another job so she could travel with him from my books. I would never have known that if I hadn't been doing that podcast. And if he hadn't been talking to his friend about me, he wouldn't have known she was reading my books. I didn't know they were in the library in St. Louis. So authors don't know these things. They're writing books, and they're putting them out there, and people are buying them, and you don't hear anything else, so you don't know what they liked what they didn't like. So you always leader review pictures. Authors love pictures of children reading their books. If you're reading them to a class, whatever you're doing with them, I love to see pictures.

[00:25:20.550] - Dr Dawn Menge

And when I first started and we did Sir Heathy Bean, I had a friend who lived in Long Island, so she bought a copy for everyone. Her son was in kindergarten, so she bought a copy for every child in the classroom. And my mom and I actually flew there and we went to the school and did a reading. And then there's a bookstore on Long Island and she set up a reading there. And there was a man who was standing in the back and it's quite lengthy. It's third and fourth grade, so it's really, actually hard to read in front of. It takes a little while. And there was a man in the background and he walked up to me afterwards. He was a doctor and he said his son had autism. He said his son reads the book every single night. Oh, my goodness. And I'm like, wow, I didn't know that. And it's just amazing to know that. And then when I do the books, the book signings up here, they'll say, oh, we read it every night, or we do this. And I'm like, I would not know that. You need to tell the authors that you love their books.

[00:26:21.530] - Dori Durbin

I think you're right. You just don't know what kind of impact that you might have. Or even the kids are aspiring authors that get fuel because they see all your books. That's such a good motivator to keep you writing.

[00:26:33.790] - Dr Dawn Menge

Oh, yeah. Well, I have three more. Besides Precious the baby dragon, I have a few more Queen Vernitas that are almost done. I have the illustrations for it's called Queen Vernita finds more colors than a box of crayons. And on Facebook, I found it was actually a photographing tour, this really neat lady, so I went there with her. So it was a very small group. It was like seven of us, so they're all in the book. And all the things that we did while we were there, we saw lighthouses and covered bridges and of course, all the beautiful colors. And so that's going to be pre k to first grade, and it should come out also in the fall. I have another one I'm writing with Kent and it's going to be on Death Valley because he loves the desert. I do not. He does. So he's helping me write the books on the desert. But his grandmother took a trip 100 years ago to Death Valley and he has her diary from it. So I went to Death valley and researched it. So we're combining the two trips 100 years apart in this book.

[00:27:37.960] - Dr Dawn Menge

So it's going to be really neat. This book that we did on Tucson, it took us ten years to actually write it. We started it. And then life got busy, and then we went back and finally finished it. So I told him, I hope the Death Valley One doesn't take ten years. Kind of started it, did all the research. We just haven't started actually writing it down. But we have that one, and I'm actually going to Italy in a month. I met I did podcast during the pandemic because I couldn't do any book signings, and I was teaching from home. I said, okay, I'm going to learn to be a public speaker better. And I started signing up for podcasts. And you find all these groups on Facebook for any authors or anyone else who's out there because they have podcasts on almost every subject you can think of. So my goal was to do 100 interviews. So I think this one is my 91st podcast interview. And so that was my goal. So I started talking to people all over the world, and there's a lot of people from, like, Australia and Jamaica. They were really interested in what I do for a living.

[00:28:43.500] - Dr Dawn Menge

They're more interested in the disabilities. But I met a woman who had a radio station in Jamaica, neat lady. She has a book series. She moved to Italy, and now she's giving an author event in a beautiful place in Italy. So she offered me to go, and it was a nice price. So I said, how could I not? So I'm going to go there for a week, and then we're going to learn about some other authors, and I'm going to do presentation on storytelling, and they're going to have a gala. It's going to be a lot of fun. So I'm really excited. I've never been to Europe, so I'm very excited about it.

[00:29:18.070] - Dori Durbin

So you went from thinking that you had an assignment to do to going to Europe.

[00:29:22.230] - Dr Dawn Menge

Yeah, and I've done some things with a woman who lives in at least she lives in South Africa. And they say, we'll come out here, we'll write a book on Africa. And I'm like, oh, I'd love to do that. It's like, you just talk to people, and they're like, oh, come write a book about my area. Or just I was like, oh, if I was not teaching, I could do all this stuff. And then my publisher, he was setting up trips to the Philippines and Germany and China and Florida to the book events. I'm not quite sure if those are going to pan out yet, but I said, sure, I'll try that. And so I'm always up for a new adventure. And so that's one thing I learned about three or four years into writing The Queen Vrinita. I got kind of discouraged, and I'm like, Why am I doing this? I'm putting all this work in there, and there's money involved. I do a lot of traveling for book events, and what I tell everyone is to join professional organizations. I joined the SCBWI Society of book writers and illustrators. I joined the United States Board on Books.

[00:30:30.670] - Dr Dawn Menge

And you talk to people, and you talk to people who are Newberry Award winners and people who haven't even published yet, and they're just so encouraging. And you can go to workshops. I did a lot of that for a couple of years, and I saw a speech that Kwame Alexander gets, and it's on YouTube if anybody wants to watch it. It's called? Say yes. So he's telling us how he started his journey. He was working really hard, and it wasn't really going that great, but he was saying yes to opportunities. So if you go to a book signing but from there, I got a book reading at a library, and then I did a book. So you don't know what's going to come of things if you try them. So always be open and try new ideas.

[00:31:14.370] - Dori Durbin

Do you have any advice for overcoming that impostor syndrome?

[00:31:20.570] - Dr Dawn Menge

You're an author. If you've written something, you're an author. You can't gauge yourself by other people, what they're doing. So that's hard. It's kind of scary putting yourself out there and having people make bad comments or whatever. I haven't really ever had that. The lowest thing I've had is like a four, I think. But it's hard and it's discouraging, but you have to do it for yourself. And the biggest thing that I like to say is if you write about yourself or your own experiences or maybe someone really close to you, you're going to teach someone something. Someone out there needs to hear whatever it is you're saying. And if you reach one person, one person, and you make their life easier or better, or you help them deal with what's going on with them in any way, you can take that as your win. If you're getting more out of it than just the monetary part of it, then you don't worry about the money. The money will come. At some point, I started doing film festivals. I started that started by I was on Facebook, and a lady was looking for people to enter.

[00:32:27.680] - Dr Dawn Menge

She had conquering disabilities with film. And I said, oh, well, I have books. Can I enter my books? It's a film festival. And she said yes. So it started from there. I entered my books. I've won actually several awards from her film festival, and then I didn't write them. They were written by my books, screenplays. So I've won probably I think I've won 73 book awards, and now I've won probably 20 film festival awards. But I have two screenplays, so that's what I'm entering into, those. I have one on the Sandy Beach, and I have one on the astronomy one. And the woman who runs the Conquering Disability film Festival is finishing up a screenplay I have on the volcanic islands. Wow. You just never know.

[00:33:21.730] - Dori Durbin

That's probably the best advice for people, too, isn't it? To just take that risk and see what happens.

[00:33:28.210] - Dr Dawn Menge

Just go for it. And if you've written something, you're an author. There's no imposter or anything.

[00:33:35.510] - Dori Durbin

Yeah, I love that advice. It's perfect. Okay, Don, so we're very interested in your books. Where can we find you and your books?

[00:33:44.630] - Dr Dawn Menge

Well, all you have to do is Google Queen Bernita, and they will come up. They're at Amazon, Barnes and Noble. Any online store? And I have a Facebook. Don menge one. I have a website we're working on, Queenvernita. Net. And of course, I have Instagram, don Menge and Twitter Queenvernita. And my email is queenvernitasvisitors@yahoo.com.

[00:34:06.940] - Dori Durbin

That's awesome. Well, thank you so much, Don, for your time today. I can't wait for people to find you. Thank you so much.