A little girl growing up in a small town in Kansas who loved words stumbled upon the Anne of
Green Gables series one day and instantly found a companion. Her name was Julie, but she felt like she saw the world just as Anne did: in colors, with secret names and a sense of intimacy with the world. It was this book and her love of words that inspired her to create her own stories and share them with the world.
Dr. Julie Sellers’ love for story telling and words dates as far back as she can remember and stems from her childhood access to books and her grandfather’s stories.
At fourteen, she dreamed of writing a story based on her experience of reading Anne of Green Gables and the strong connection she found between her hometown and the world of Anne Shirley in the novel. Her love of words enabled her to learn Spanish, travel the world, write a trilogy and produce a whole volume of poetry inspired by L.M. Montgomery’s writings.
Growing up on a farm in the Flint Hills with an older sister who was “too cool” to play with her and only three TV channels, young Julie found other ways to entertain herself.
“I’d make up stories about the animals on the farm, or my stuffed animals, or just anything I saw,” she said. “When I would go swimming in the creek, I named all of the places around me, and made up fascinating stories about myself with this old inner tube while I was floating along.”
When she first read Anne of Green Gables, Sellers felt she saw a lot of the redheaded Canadian girl in her own life. Avonlea may as well have been her small town in Kansas and it was this interaction between a reader from a different country than the girl in the book and how they were in some ways the same that she dreamed of capturing in her own novel one day.
Much of her storytelling inspiration came from her grandfather who she described as “one of the best storytellers I have ever heard in my life.”
“He had been a dairyman, so he delivered milk around our small town,” Sellers said. “He could tell you a story about anybody in that town, going back for generations, or about any of the buildings, and I just loved to listen to him, and he just knew how to tell a story so it engaged you and drew you in.”
As a child, Sellers said she “always wrote” and it was both her grandfather’s stories and her love of books that formed her literary mind.
The books she read inspired her to travel, to see the places depicted in her beloved stories. “I love using words,” Sellers said. “I love expressing myself with words, and I thought if I knew those languages, then I could travel to other places.”
Learning Spanish enabled that idea to become a reality and she spent time exploring a variety of countries including Spain for a year, Great Britain, France, Portugal for a brief visit, Ontario, Mexico, Spain, Ecuador, Bolivia, Dominican Republic and Prince Edward Island as well as other places around Canada.
Sellers earned a Ph.D. in education and has been teaching Spanish at Benedictine College for over ten years. Her colleague, Dr. Filberto Mares Hernandez has been working alongside Sellers in the department of World Languages and Cultures for many of those years.
Hernandez said she is a friend and colleague, describing her as passionate, professional, strict, very helpful, funny and trustworthy. The two constantly share ideas for how to help their students.
“She has taught me how to be…more professional and just how to handle life,” Hernandez said.
With Sellers as department chair, Hernandez said she has created “an atmosphere that we feel comfortable sharing and giving our opinion or feedback to have a better program. She is very open to listening.”
Sellers and Hernandez regularly rely on one another to house sit and, around Halloween a few years ago, Sellers visited him when he was sick and in the hospital.
While Hernandez has not finished reading her book, he said that her story is heavily ingrained within the story of Ann in her novel. The character and setting give insight into who Sellers is as a person.
Amid teaching and traveling, writing did not remain at the forefront of Sellers’ mind and focus for many years. 2020 was the year that her writing began to take off with the pandemic allotting time to write. That year, Sellers achieved three big writing feats.
The first was earning first place in a Kansas writing competition for a short story and the title of “Prose Writer of the Year” and she joined the Kansas Authors Club (KAC).
Her second accomplishment came as Blue Cedar Press published a collection of her poetry. Starting in April with National Poetry Month and for 17 months beyond, Sellers had been accumulating a new poem a day, often inspired by images, passages or scenes from L.M. Montgomery’s writings.
The poetry was published alongside photographs of Prince Edward Island where the Anne of Green Gables stories take place and photographs from Kansas. Sellers shared the importance of this duality.
The poetry “really is that interaction of a reader from Kansas, loving Anne of Green Gables and loving the language that Montgomery uses in her works and creating with that,” she said.
Her third achievement came during the pandemic when, without school to teach and amid the uncertainty of whether classes would be on campus in the fall, Sellers set up another challenge for herself: a novel in a month.
National Novel Writing Month takes place in November of each year with writers attempting to write roughly 1,700 words each day in the hopes of completing a 50,000 word novel by the end of 30 days.
Sellers took this model and began her own novel in a month, producing her first draft of Ann of Sunflower Lane. Thanks to the pandemic, the idea she had been sitting on since age fourteen was finally on the page.
“Ever since I read Anne of Green Gables, I thought, oh my goodness, this is just like my small town Kansas community, and I thought somebody should write a Kansas Anne, that somebody should be me,” Sellers said.
Of course, finishing the first draft was only the beginning of the challenge. Hours of editing, proof reading and pouring over feedback from beta readers followed.
The result?
In 2022, Anne of Sunflower Lane hit the shelves of Kansas bookstores and Sellers’ dream had come true.
With her first book finally out, Sellers’ work was just beginning. Book two will come out later this year and book three will be published next year. Sellers continues to write and share her work.
Cheryl Unruh, a friend of Sellers from KAC, shared how Sellers is constantly receiving rewards at KAC conventions and retreats.
“One thing that impresses me about Julie is her dedication to the writing craft. I admire her for both her quality and quantity of writing. She produces a lot–poetry, essays, and novels. And as a writer myself, I know that takes time and focus,” Unruh said.
Sellers’ writing is both professional and beautiful.
“Tracy Million Simmons, publisher at Meadowlark Press, and I put together a non-fiction journal twice a year, 105 Meadowlark Reader. Julie Sellers has been published quite a few times in 105. When Julie submits an essay, we know that it is polished and ready to go,” Unruh said.
Of course, life cannot revolve around writing and teaching all the time. Sellers enjoys taking walks with her dog and spending time with her husband and has found inspiration from joining the KAC and being surrounded by other writers.
“Hearing people who write because they love to write, they find any way they can to share their words – smaller publications, larger publications was really inspiring to me. So I did get back into it, and I’m glad that I did,” she said. “It’s kind of like being a writer never would let me go, even though I thought I had let it go.”
This is something she hopes to share with others.
Don’t give up,” she said. “It’s really easy to, and don’t think if you’re not, you know, number one on the New York Times bestseller list that you failed, because being a writer is first for you, and it’s for whoever reads you, if that’s your friends or if that’s a smaller publication, if it’s an online journal, whoever it is that’s reading you, somebody’s read you.”
