I am pleased to get to announce the publication of my mom’s book today, her first birthday since going to be with the Lord. My mom loved words and writing. I knew she published a few of her reflections and poems in local papers and discovered she had published a few in a local journal. Toward the end of her life that she mentioned in passing that she had gathered most of these in a notebook and referred to them as her “book.” It is fun now to see them arranged and published as a book.

Here is what I put on the back of the book:

Barbara Van Neste always wanted to be a Southern writer. This volume gathers her “poems and pieces,” some of which she had put into a notebook for a possible book one day. In these writings you will find humor, appreciation of simple life and the outdoors, as well as reflections on joys and tragedies of life all in the light of her Christian faith.