RC Marlen (a.k.a.Rosalie Marlen Schele) spent her first forty years in St. Louis, Missouri. While growing up, she lived with the six Marlen siblings and worked in the family drugstore which provided much of the material for this novel as well as her second book, The Drugstore, which is not yet published. After college, she taught Mathematics, earned a Masters, started a business in Los Gatos, California teaching adults about computers, and then fell in love with Henry Schele who took her to live in Chile and Argentina for fourteen years. In the year 2000 she finished Inside the Hatboxes and three months later became a widow.