11/01/2026
“My sister, three brothers, and I grew up on a Vermont dairy farm in a region known as the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, USA, where my Scottish ancestors settled almost two hundred years ago. Our lives revolved around our church, our community, and the hard work of farming. Along with milking and feeding the animals each morning and evening, there was the work of each season: maple sugaring, plowing, picking stone, planting, haying, corn-cutting, harvest, cutting wood. While my parents lives were consumed by farming and providing for their children, they managed to pass on much more to us. My mother, a teacher, instilled in us a love of books and reading, and a curiosity about everything, while my father, besides being an excellent athlete, has also encouraged our interest in the natural world, whether it was identifying birds, trees and wildflowers, or pointing out constellations on a starry night. My book As Long As There Are Mountains is based on my childhood and my love of the farm, the land, and the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.
The Northeast Kingdom of Vermont is a hard place to make a living, but a wonderful place to live. My husband, Tom, and I have worked many years building our timber-frame house in these hills. We make syrup from our maple trees each spring, and we've planted an orchard of old apple varieties. We enjoy many sports together on the dirt roads and trails here. I am an athlete, naturalist, artist and writer. I run five to ten miles each morning, cross-country ski, mountain bike, roller blade, swim, windsurf, kayak and canoe, rock climb, and play tennis. I am an outdoorswoman, enjoying hiking astronomy, bird watching, and creating watercolor and pastel paintings of wildflowers, birds, and landscapes. I love animals and have rescued most of my pets: three horses, seven cats and either dogs. I love history, especially of the Civil War. I am learning to play the bagpipes.
My first children's book, The Canada Geese Quilt, grew out of my love and admiration for my grandmother, Helen Urie Rowell, and a special quilt we made together. My grandmother began quilting in her sixties, and made about 250 quilts. I designed several of them, including the quilt that inspired the book. I show these quilts in the schools I visit, and I encourage students to look for the stories in their own families. Two of my true family stories are Wilderness Cat and The Bear That Heard Crying, which is an amazing story of my great-great-great-great-great-aunt who was lost in the woods in 1783, when she was three years old, and a bear that took care of her. Every family has stories that are too good to be forgotten, stories that need to be written down and told and passed on to the next generations. I am currently working on over thirty books, most of them based on family stories. My sister, Helen, is the family genealogist; I have such fun researching town histories and walking old cemeteries with her, to find the stories. I feel my family's history will provide me with enough stories for a lifetime of writing.”
- From Natalie Kinsey-Warnock
https://www.kinsey-warnock.com/
-Photos courtesy of the author, Bear Pond Books, Montpelier and the Mary Hogan School, Middlebury.
