meforiginals

About Mary Elizabeth Fricke

I am a farmer's wife, mother of two adult sons who have wonderful wives and grandmother to the sweetest, cutest two kids on earth. When I'm alone, I morph into this voracious reader, sometimes crafter person, sometimes seamstress person, but more often than not 'that night owl writer'.

I have lived my entire life within five miles of the Missouri River. My husband and I have lived forty years of our forty-three-year marriage on a farm that has been consistently owned and operated by his family for five generations.

Since the early 1800's my husband's family has been involved in a number of successful farming enterprises, including growing grapes and producing wine. During the 1980's and 1990's while we maintained a farrow-to-finish hog operation of 200 sows, our life was the basis for my autobiography 'Dino, Godzilla and the Pigs, My Life on Our Missouri Hog Farm', published in 1993 by SoHo Press (New York). By the end of the 1990's we no longer raised hogs but continue to annually crop-farm several hundred acres of corn and soybeans. We also raise a substantial amount of hay and maintain pastureland for our herd of Angus cattle.

Over the years, I have written non-fiction both freelance and as a ghost writer. I have had articles published in national magazines and through websites such as Guru.com. I am a member of the Heartland Writers Guild. After submitting writing related articles to the HWG monthly newsletter, The Heartland Journal, throughout the 90's, in 2002 I became Journal editor and continued that job through 2015.

I have been employed as a teacher-aid in elementary education in parochial schools and I am a certified catechist. I coordinated the elementary P.S.R. (Parish School of Religion) in my parish for nineteen years (1985 thru 2004) while also teaching the 7th and 8th grade P.S.R. classes. During my sons' childhood and teenage years, I was also a 4H Project Leader teaching such crafts as 'home environment', 'visual arts', sewing, and crochet. During those years I wrote and directed many of the skits the local 4H Club performed at the annual Share-the-Fun-Nite festivities.

My lifelong ambition to write and publish fiction became reality when Pigeon in a Snare', the 1st in my romantic suspense series, collectively titled 'Birds in Peril' was published by AKW e-books in May of 2014. #2 in the series, 'Roses for the Sparrow' was published in Oct, 2014. Unfortunately, the owner/publisher of AKW e-books retired at the end of 2014 and AKW closed its doors. Rather than seek another publisher, I chose to try the world of Independent Publishing. The result was #3 in my 'Bird' series, 'Plight of the Wren', officially published on Aug. 15, 2015 and #4 'Robin Unaware' published Jan. 1, 2016 under the meforiginals label. 'Wise Bold Eagle' was published in 2022 and in 2023 I published the final addition to the series titled, 'Blue Bird of Happiness'.

The Sweet Pea Trilogy was published first as individual e-books the fall of 2017. In February, 2018 Sweet Pea was published as an e-book gift set with all three titles of the trilogy under one cover. December, 2018, all three books were again published under one cover in paperback, titled Sweet Pea Trilogy.
'Shattered Image' is a stand-alone novel based in the 1980s.

All of my fictional stories are based in rural mid-western areas and concern the unique but quickly vanishing way of life on the family farm as well as other mysterious intricacies that evolve life from generation to generation.

'meforiginals' is a title I chose many years ago to label gifts or objects I created for others. Sometimes I 'm a crafter. Sometimes I 'm a seamstress. Most of the time I am a published author. Well...I write after being a wife, a mom and a grandmother. The purpose of this website is to give anyone who visits here information about my books, where to buy them, who I am, what is happening now, and what the future holds for my writing life.