Books to Uplift the Spirit

Kelly Elstrott

Author

My life started out in New Orleans, the youngest of five kids, in the prefab suburbs where I shot BB guns in the swamp and played kick-the-can til the street lights came on.

I endured an inquisition of Spanish nuns in Catholic school where I developed the requisite measure of psychological guilt before I was released to freedom at LSU in Baton Rouge.

My major was history, the primary goal was not to flunk out and be taught to shoot human beings in the jungle. When the war ended, I switched to chemical engineering because my roommate's homework looked more interesting.

I married the girl next to me in my Organic Chemistry Lab. She got all A’s in the three classes we shared and...well, I passed. She went on to become a pediatrician and we had six children together in her spare time.

I can thank my triplet son for turning me towards writing. In first grade he drew a family picture for the ‘meet the teacher’ night wall of fame and depicted me on the couch with a remote watching TV. The shame, from the mouth of babes. Five years later I had birthed a non-fiction book, The Fifth Revelation.

We drove cross country on a thirty city book tour with our six kids and stayed in National Parks along the way. The triplets were ten by then, and after being cooped up in a Suburban for a month we arrived at a religious conference in Vancouver, BC. My two boys got into a fight in front of the registration desk and provided a dubious introduction to my talk on Family that evening.

Our family fell in love with the Northwest on that trip, so we left behind the mosquitoes, roaches and humidity to settle in Oregon. The schools are good, the air is clean, the folks are friendly, the forests are at my backdoor, and within a few hours drive I can be at the Pacific ocean, climbing snow-capped mountains or hiking in the desert.

I recently retired after forty years as a sales engineer handling pollution control and power generation equipment.

I'm now working on two non-fiction novels that should be released down the road if they are deemed worthy.