Book Signing Held at the Phillips County Museum

There were two authors at a book signing hosted by the Phillips County Museum on Wednesday, May 11. Coffee and cookies were provided to guests as they were able to talk to the authors and get their books signed.

One author, Heidi Lulloff, is a local author of now three children's books. Lulloff moved to Malta in 2000 and was a teacher, mostly of first-graders, until 2018.

"I have really enjoyed learning the process of what it takes to get a book out. The conversations with the artists, the editors, and everything else that goes into it," said Lulloff.

She says her first two books, Yolanda the Yoga Queen and Benny the Baller Loves Basketball, are about kids having to work hard, and seeing their dreams come true if they put the hard work in.

Her latest book, Clara Clutter, is more about a girl that sees the world as being neat and tidy. Something she is not. And she has to find her place in the world, where she can feel at home.

Heidi Lulloff lives in Phillips County with her husband and says there are more ideas for books, she just has to find the right time between calving and everything else that goes on at the ranch.

The second author is Keni Ilo Brayton, a native Californian whose family has deep roots in Phillips County.

Her book, Child of the Prairie – An Accidental Memoir, is a memoir of life on the northern Montana prairie homestead of her mother, Esther Pearl Stine, her four siblings, and their parents, Harry and Nellie, in the early decades of the 20th Century.

Brayton says that the book is the result of her finding her mother's written memories of her childhood and of her grandfather Harry's letters written between 1912 and 1929.

"Those documents became the framework for the story. My mother's words touched me deeply and my grandfather's letters compelled me to learn more."