Where Are They Now? Author Paula Winskye publishes 21st book

“I’d marry a publisher’s daughter” is the route that an NDSU English professor wryly said he would take when his student Paula (neé Pfeiffer) Winskye asked for advice about publishing a book. In other words, the instructor felt both his and Paula’s chances of printing a novel were miniscule. I wonder if he knows that she will publish her 21st book sometime this year or that she is married, but definitely not to a publisher’s son!

Growing up on a farm east of New Rockford, Paula had two main interests: writing and horses. She combined the two when, at the age of 12, she began writing stories about girls and horses. “People in the area probably remember me as the ‘horse-crazy girl’,” she admits. Sometime prior to graduating from New Rockford High School in 1977, Paula focused her writing on family saga novels.

Paula’s first summer out of high school was spent at Montana State University in Bozeman so that she could attend horseshoeing school. She then attended college at NDSU that fall, graduating with a major in Ag Education in the fall of 1980. After Paula taught at Bowman and Rhame, Paula decided to go back to school to earn a degree in Light Horse Management from the University of Minnesota-Crookston. With credits she had already earned at NDSU, Paula was able to complete the two-year program in only a year, graduating with High Distinction in 1983. She worked at several Arabian stables in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and returned to Drake, N.D., to teach again. Paula’s desire to return to New Rockford got the best of her, and she moved back to the area in 1986.

Albert, Paula’s brother, still operates the farm that was owned by their parents Vivian and Jim. Jim passed away in 1975. Two brothers are also deceased, but all three of her sisters live in North Dakota. Paula met her future husband John, a Vietnam veteran originally from Massachusetts, in Carrington where the Desperado band was playing. Recently arrivingin the area from Texas, John was working with a company that had a contract with the railroad. The two married in 1990, and four years later, the couple bought Paula’s aunt and uncle’s farmstead in Sheldon Township.

Holding down a variety of jobs while living near New Rockford did not deter Paula from pursuing her interests of horses and writing. She raised Tennessee Walking horses and rode one of them almost every year in New Rockford’s famous Fourth of July parades. While she was employed at City Hospital, sub taught at the school, drove school bus and the public transportation bus, and reported for the “Transcript,” Paula still dabbled with her fictional writing. At her husband John’s urging, she self-published her first novel in 2003.

Createspace, an independent publishing platform, is the company in which Paula has found the most success because both her shipping costs and price per book are substantially lower than other publishing companies’ fees. Once an Amazon enterprise, Createspace has since been rolled into Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), which allows authors to publish both paperbacks and electronic books on the same website. Gold Star Lee is the only book that Paula published under her maiden name because she wrote the first version of the story while she was still in high school. Paula F. Winskye is the author name on all of her other novels.

Although her love for Eddy County has always been great, Paula and John yearned to live year-round in a warm climate. After spending time in Nevada with friends who also owned property in Arizona, the couple soon decided to purchase a 40-acre piece of land 12 miles out of Snowflake, Ariz., in January of 2014. (“Snowflake” allows Paula a nominal winter effect!) Annual road trips to Tampa, Fla., are made to see Paula’s stepson Joe, his wife Lani, and one-year-old daughter Charlie.

In 2018, Paula joined the Sheriff’s Auxiliary Volunteers of Navajo County. She assists deputies with various duties, including crowd and traffic control, crime scene security and house watches. Paula says, “I enjoy this kind of work because I can learn about law enforcement, which helps me in my mystery writing.”

Despite the “advice” she had received many years ago from the NDSU professor, along with several rejection letters from publishing companies, Paula Winskye persevered by writing and publishing 10 Tony Wagner mysteries, two Randy McKay books, four Collins family sagas, three romances and one book for young readers. In fact, she has written a movie script for the first book in her Tony Wagner series, so we may someday see “The Reverend Finds His Calling” on the big screen! Paula’s writing career is surely a testament to taking control of a desired goal even though others may not be very encouraging.