Hello,

My name is Diane L. Frueh.  Most of my friends know me as Diane L. Johnson, but Gary Frueh and I were married on January 31, 2020.  It is a second marriage for both of us and we both lost our former spouses to cancer. 

Gary is a retired farmer from North Dakota and I am a retired U. S. Forest Service employee. 

So, what is Toston Sonshine Press about?  It’s about writing for reluctant readers.  I write for children who have a learning difficulty or just hate to read.  When I design a book for children, I use pictures to help the child visualize the concepts or situations I am describing.  I use short sentences whenever possible and paragraph breaks to keep a page of text broken into smaller chunks to read. I use simple vocabulary and brief sentence structure so the child can read at a steady pace without being slowed or confused by unfamiliar words.  I encourage children to learn new words by providing a picture glossary at the back of some of my books to define unfamiliar words and concepts with photographs.  Children usually go through a book and look at the pictures first anyway and if they see unfamiliar words defined with photos they won’t have to stop once they have begun reading.

I focus on rural children using images and situations they can relate to and stories that entertain them.