Ms. Alana is a publish school teach and has been spreading a love learning and reading for decades. She two wonderful adult children who love to read!
Ms. Alana has always adored elephants; in fact, they are her favorite land animal.
Ms. Alana and her “was-band” lived on a farm in Hawaii where she owned a successful volcano tour company for seven years. She moved from Maui in 2023 and now continues to teach “on the mainland.”
Author Interview
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
My greatest work was a fictional feminist novel entitled In Search of the Millennium Man. It was a full length novel that I wrote in 2002. It took me two years and hundreds of hours to write. I shared it at the Maui Writer’s Conference and if I could go back in time and undo that, I certainly would.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
My favorite author is Paulo Coelho. He is amazing. I really don’t have a favorite children’s book author. There are so many – of course, The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein is powerful and never fails to bring the emotion no matter how many times it is read. Dr. Seuss, as well, despite the controversy, is riveting for most children. His books often spark a love of reading due to its rhythm and rhyme, and his stories are timeless in their appeal.
What are you working on now?
The second book to this series Emma the Elephant.
It’s cute and funny. I can’t wait to release it.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
As unpopular as this answer may be in 2026, an exhaustive version of The Bible. The Alchemist by Coelho. An unabridged edition of Alice in Wonderland.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I was fascinated by books as soon as I could read. Even before, actually, as my parents reading to me was always a delightful end to a day full of bike riding, making mud pies, and a rousing game of dodgeball in the park. Perhaps coming from a professorial family who truly valued education, reading was always a center point in our home. I will never forget our downstairs “den” area which literally had a wall that was nothing but rows and rows of books, thousands of them. Most of them were beautiful hardback books. Looking back, there was a “Hogwart’s Library” sort of mystique about our familial book collection that was both beckoning and magical to my siblings and me. There existed a whole world “out there” to discover. Now books have been marginalized by computers and many forms of digital entertainment. Attention spans have been forced into small bytes of time. It’s a great loss, in my opinion, to humanity.
Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
My message is one of self-discovery and self-confidence. Trust and faith in the process of life. There’s so much anxiety and panic out there in the world, especially in young people. People have forgotten that nature is as old as time and it actually knows us better than we know ourselves.
Do you see writing as a career?
The irony is that for it to be a career, the writer has to realize that it is a passion that can’t be quelled nor a passion from which there is escape. I have been diving a lot into the life and work of Van Gogh lately, and he created for the sake of creating. He couldn’t do anything else because he was, in heart and mind, a painter. If you live long enough, you can make great money from the passion that overflows in your work, whether it’s writing, painting, acting, etc. but you have to really punch through the wall of compromise and get over the idea of doing it for transactional reasons. In many cases, when it comes to artists (…and yes, I think of writers as artists), you must be willing to sacrifice all. Some people don’t live to see the payoff. Then there’s the problem of theft. That’s the worst and unfortunately, it happens all the time.
For your own reading, do you prefer ebooks or traditional paperback books?
Although I certainly see the convenience of ebooks, I personally prefer traditional 3D books.
What is the funniest typo you’ve ever written?
Spellcheck is my enema.
Emma the Elephant is available for purchase on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Emma-Elephant-favorite-Loxodonta-Elephant-ebook/dp/B0DQG8T34B