Bankers gain new skills in woodwork

What began as a story for her Swedish-Finn family has now grown into two popular books.

“Mainly, it was just done for family on a lark,” said author and Black Butte Ranch resident Agnes Rands.

She recently self-published her second book, “Even Seagulls Cry.”

Rands began her account of her immigrant parents with “Where the Huckleberries Grow.”

Her parents grew up in the Swedish-speaking section of Finland, married in Portland and then moved to the logging camps of Northwest Washington where Rands was born. Her book brings readers into the Scandinavian community of the Pacific Northwest where families work hard in the early logging camps yet still find ways to enjoy life. Rands was pleasantly surprised to find her first book selling more than 2,500 copies with readers in two countries interested to know what happened next.

“In Finland, people are really curious about what happened to family members who immigrated,” said Rands.

“Even Seagulls Cry” follows Rands’ family as they move to Anacortes, she enters her teenage years and World War II breaks out. She relates what it was like trying to fit into Americanculture with parents who spoke broken English and had old-country ways.

When Rands began to tell her family story, her sister wondered, “What is there to write about?” Rands finds a lot of interesting stories, which she tells in appealing prose. First, she writes a story of family familiar to the many Americans whose parents immigrated. Also, she weaves in history important to the time from life on the home front during World War II to the Finnish-Russian wars and polio. Early readers of “Even Seagulls Cry” talk of being “drawn in” to an “engaging family story.”

Rands researched her book by contacting historical museums, talking with high school classmates and talking with relatives in Finland.

On one trip to Finland, she found an unexpected treasure. A cousin gave her a shoebox full of letters written by her father to his mother. Rands begins “Even Seagulls Cry” with a letter from her father back home in 1939 talking of the “madness in Europe.”

When Rand was ateenager, she worried that her family could be locked up in internment camps since her parents were citizens of a country considered an enemy of America.

“I remember sitting and listening to my parents talk and wondering if we would be interred like the Japanese,” said Rands.

She writes in the “creative nonfiction” genre in which she uses mostly real people and events but sometimes creates dialog to tell the story. Rands says she stayed true to the story and hopes to bring readers “a glimpse of a time and place you would otherwise never know.”

Rands said her first book has sold well at Scandinavian festivals, it was chosen to be in the curriculum of an elementary school in California and it has been well read by Rands’ extended family.