OKMULKE, Oklv. – Mvskoke Media reporter Thomas Jackson was lucky enough to sit down for an interview with Muscogee writer and former nurse Tamara Sunflower about her recently released book, “The Adventures of Pete the Purple Cow, Volume 1”. The following is an excerpt from Sunflower’s interview.
Q: So can you tell me a bit about yourself?
SUNFLOWER: “My name is Tamara Sunflower and I’m the author of ‘The Adventures of Pete the Purple Cow’ and its Volume 1 book.”
Q: So what inspired you to write this book?
SUNFLOWER: “So… What happened was I was in grade school and I had dyslexia. I didn’t know I had it, but I had a reading difficulty and I had low scores in reading, and I sat in the back of the class. So the teacher told my mother ‘Your daughter has a disability or something wrong, because she’s turning her words and she’s basically reading backwards.’ So I was teased because I couldn’t read very good.”
“I got my eyes checked, got me some glasses, and they moved me from the back seat of the class to the front, and my grades went up. … Long story short, I made a vow at that point that I would give back to the community in some kind of way to help kids. So now, here I am, grown, and I’ve always wanted to write a book.”
“So when we moved from Los Angeles to Norco, California, we had a little farm. We had chickens, we had horses, but we didn’t have any pigs and we didn’t have any cows. But I’ve always been fascinated by cows because Norco, California is a dairy town, and there were all these cows.”
“So I had a vision. I’ve always been spiritual, and I was praying, and God said ‘you’re gonna write books, and literally, he said, you’re gonna write two books: one for children and one for nurses. … And he said, look back on your childhood and look back on the things that were good about your childhood, because we came from a very dysfunctional family.”
“So all of this came to my mind like, oh my God, Pete the Purple Cow, you know, and so the story just came to me, and it made me think about the animals, how I was treated, and how I felt. And you know, kids are being bullied nowadays, and different things happen, you know, because of their color, and we were treated differently in Norco, because it was basically an all-white town. There were only two African American, Native American families in that town: ours and another one. It always made me feel bad. … It always just stuck with me, and then when I went into nursing, I struggled because of my dyslexia at the time. I always had this in my heart that I wanted to give back to someone or give back to the community.”
Tamara Sunflower’s book is available on Amazon for $14.99, and was edited by Judith Z. Ulrich.
