About
When I was seven years old, my baby brother was diagnosed with cancer. This was a journey that was filled with darkness, but also with great miracles from God. Luke was not given a good prognosis, but he is a survivor today and a great man.
Over the years, I have heard many stories from siblings of childhood cancer survivors and from the survivors themselves about how they made the decision to enter the medical profession because of their experience with childhood cancer. Interestingly, I never wanted to do this. Even as a child, I would always say I wanted to write my brother's story and to write to cure cancer. I didn't even know what I meant by that except that storytelling is my passion and his story needed to be shared with the world.
I earned my degree in Journalism which I first used to do public relations and fundraising in Mexico. I have always had a great passion for improving the lives of children who suffer from sickness, abuse, neglect and poverty. For two years, I had the privilege of working with kids in Mexico and into Central and South America, raising funds to improve children's homes. I had the great joy of traveling all over the United States and into other countries to share stories of these children and encourage people to donate to help them with basic needs like clothing and food; education; dental and medical; and an overall better life.
When I returned to the USA at the age of 24, I moved to the Dallas area to teach English and Spanish (I am certified to teach grades 6-12, both English and Spanish). Not long after that, I married my number one best friend in the world, Bill Crews. What a great coincidence that he understood the childhood cancer community! He was eight years old when his six-year-old sister died of leukemia. He will never stop mourning that loss.
A couple of years later, we had a baby and moved to The Woodlands, Texas. Then, a couple of years later we had another baby and we thought we were living one great life.
In 2002, I remembered my desire to write to cure cancer. As a former teacher and journalist, I loved writing and I did do a lot of freelance writing for magazines and newspapers/journals, but I had yet to write a children's book which was one of my greatest desires.
I will never forget the day I was listening to a radio program and heard the speaker say that no one would ever be able to write children's books to bring families together like J.K. Rowling. He said her books were the best at making kids want to read and that parents were reading with their kids for the first time in generations and this would never be beaten unless someone could come up with something better.
Well, I want to preface this by saying that I also enjoyed the Harry Potter books, but that was a challenge straight to my soul. Not long after that, I was sitting and wondering about my purpose in life when it suddenly struck me that I was not the children's book author, but that children with cancer were. I could see a clear picture in my mind of kids with cancer writing and illustrating books and I just had to make this vision a reality.
I shared this with Bill and with my parents and they loved the idea so I knew it had to happen and I began doing some research about how to start a publishing company. As I did this, Bill and I also started talking about ways we could do some good for these kids by raising awareness and funding. After all, we had both seen the devastation of childhood cancer from an early age. Additionally, we had a very good friend who was dying of leukemia after a two year battle. In January 2003, he took his final breath at the age of 30 and we began to understand that children and young adults die of cancer every day and it's just not fair.
In March, we traveled with our children to visit my parents in their home in Spain where they had been living for a while. We told them that our desire to publish books and help these kids and young adults was stronger than ever and they told us they thought we should do something. On the way home, as I was looking out of the window of the plane, I had this very strong impression that not long from then, I would be sitting at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Boy, was I right.
On October 14, 2003, Bill was diagnosed with blood cancer. He had just turned 37 and I was 33, so we were in that "15-39" group of the cancer community which is considered "young adult" and sadly, statistics have not improved much for this group over the years. Bill's cancer was stage four and highly aggressive. It was also incurable, but thankfully, it was treatable.
He ended up doing just under three years of treatments, the first eight months of which were like Hell on Earth. But he was determined to go back to being the athlete he'd always been and well, I won't bore you with the long story, but Bill Crews is an Ironman triathlete and marathoner post incurable cancer!
I was surprised and filled with joy when the first children's book we published was our own children's story. They were five and three years old when their dad got sick and they wrote a book about their bravery and courage as they helped their dad fight cancer.
Soon, we got very actively involved in Team In Training with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and volunteering raising awareness and funding through other organizations including MD Anderson. We specifically raised funds for their lymphoma tissue bank when we founded our own nonprofit organization, Remission Run.
Years went by. We worked hard volunteering and raising millions of dollars for research. I continued to do freelance writing, mostly about cancer survivor stories. We were also very busy raising our children who were competitive swimmers so our weekends were full year-round.
When our youngest graduated from high school, we moved back to Fort Worth and I was working at Make-A-Wish Foundation when the pandemic struck. I resigned my position and realized that the time had come to get a publishing company started. All of us were learning to live like young cancer patients had all along - isolated, trying to entertain ourselves without friends around or going anywhere. Kids with cancer were used to this life! I started thinking about how reading can take you anywhere you want to go. You can visit far away lands or go back in time or even forward in time when you read. You can also do this by writing! It was time to start a publishing company!
I named the company Bell Asteri because I wanted the name "Bella" somehow in it. To me, cancer is a horrible fire that can leave you choking in ash. I wanted kids to know there could be beauty for those ashes. Bella means beauty! I also wanted the word "star" in the name. The star has always been my personal symbol - I am from the Lone STAR state, I love the Dallas STARS and Dallas Cowboys with their blue STAR logo, my parents always called me "the number one STAR baby of the Universe", etc. But the word star is used in so many places, so how could I be a little bit different?
My grandma died when I was 14 years old. She had liver cancer and I still miss her. She was of Greek descent so I decided to use the Greek word for star which is "Asteri" and well, it goes pretty well with "Bella" so I named the company Bell Asteri.
We republished two books we had published through a publisher in 2007 and then got started talking to potential authors and illustrators. We have many incredible projects in the works and my heart is happy.
May the authors at Bell Asteri shine like stars in the midnight sky!
Comments
Post a Comment