Lifton shares her gift for storytelling with books

NORTH KINGSVILLE – Judi Lifton can describe herself with a number of colorful words, some flattering and others disparaging.
In turns she might say she’s mischievous, adventurous, stubborn or onery.
It takes one conversation to learn that, above all else, Lifton has a gift for telling stories and should be called a storyteller.
Lifton took her gift of gab and turned herself from an academic in the science world into an award-winning author.
“I think that it’s in my metabolism,” Lifton said. “When I write these stories and even when I read them, sometimes, later, I can’t believe I wrote them. Finally, after (four books) I’ve decided I’m a writer. four books. Honest to God, it took me four friggin’ books and I finally said, and I get goosebumps right now, ‘I’m a writer.’”
The stories that Lifton tells, whether in one of her four books or in person, are an extension of the world she operates in.
“The second part of it is I really feel that I speak for the energy around me,” Lifton said. “You affect me. (A woman at the next table) affects me. It’s not like ‘Judi says.’ It’s more like there is a voice inside from multiple voices in the universe that is helping me. I don’t feel like I do this alone. I know that sounds crazy, but I don’t feel like I do it alone. Once I sit down and I get going and it just starts rolling, I don’t plan.”
“I look through the research that you went to a college that was an ag school and in the ag school, you had a specialty in snake venom because I need it later,” Lifton continued. “I have these points, but then, all of a sudden, that day you get tangled up with six characters which I never had in my mind except just to communicate that you were at the university. It’s really more of a completion, in a weird why. It’s something that, right now, I have to do.”
A resident of North Kingsville and a world traveler, Lifton won’t give away her age other than to say she is “north of 70.” She will happily, however, tell stories about the myriad adventures she’s found herself on throughout those unmentioned decades.
Many of the stories Lifton can tell are documented in her first two books, “Letters to the Chief, a Minnesota Childhood” and “A Glimpse of the Other Americas,” a backpacker’s memoir detailing her travels with her late husband, Lee.
Lifton has also penned two volumes of fables and stories titled “Judi’s Folktales Volume I” and “Judi’s Folktales Volume II.”
“I’m in a writing group and every month we would get together,” Lifton said. “If you’re writing a story, story, you go, ‘What am I going to write about?’ You look out, well the tree’s not very interesting, so you take a dictionary and put your finger on words and that’s how I came up with (my writing prompts). The mistake I made in the stories (in “Judi’s Folktales Volume I”), I didn’t put down the words at the top of the page. Those are long lost.”
“These are all adventure, mythological, magical stories with, most of the time, girls,” Lifton continued.
“Letters to the Chief, A Minnesota Childhood” earned a finalist award from the Indie Book Awards, a certificate for literary excellence from the Midwest Book Awards and an award from the National Indie Excellence Awards.
“A Glimpse of the Other Americas” won a pair of awards and “Judi’s Folktales: Magical Stories and Fables Volume I” won another one.
“Letters to the Chief” is based on the adventures Lifton found herself in as a child in Minnesota while “A Glimpse of the Other Americas” is a backpacker’s memoir based on her travels with her husband, Lee.
Lifton’s books can be purchased at Carlisle’s Home in the Harbor and on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. They are also available at local libraries.
Lifton finds it important to hold onto her sense of humor while staying positive while writing.
“I said, once, my mother was an inspirational speaker and I don’t think she really was,” Lifton said. “She wasn’t. She was a public speaker. I wouldn’t say she was inspirational. I really analyzed this. I think I wanted to give her credit for that. I think the inspiration was really your life in a book that I read. You left home or you stayed at home and you discovered a battery and you were determined to figure out how to manufacture it. Just real-life stories of the positive, that you can do it. I think I got some of that from her and I got most of it from reading the books that I chose.”
Lifton wrote “Letters to the Chief” about growing up in Willmar, Minn., a small town located in south central Minnesota on the shores of Willmar Lake and Foot Lake west of Minneapolis.
“It’s just the adventures that you get into, but it’s a lot of eccentric neighbors, a lot of humor,” Lifton said. “I came from a very strong family that was always telling me what to do and me rebelling.”
“Letters to the Chief” took decades to complete and couldn’t be published until some of the people in the stories had passed away. By writing the book, Lifton was following family tradition as she had three generations of relatives who had written their memoirs.
“It was wonderful (to tell the stories of my childhood),” Lifton said. “It was so much fun. I traveled a lot before I met Lee. I would just bop all over. I spent my money traveling. I hitchhiked by myself across Canada. I hitchhiked in Europe twice by myself. I just have an insatiable thing for other places.”
Lifton describes her hometown in Minnesota as a wonderful place.
“I have a phenomenal memory,” Lifton said. “(‘Letters to the Chief’) is very, very accurate. It was really fun, because reveled in living the way I did. We were free. We can go anywhere. We had eccentric characters in the community at that time, and we weren’t afraid of them.”
Though Lifton did keep some journals during her childhood, much of what she wrote was from memory.
“When I was little, I was about 5,” Lifton said. “There was a guy that came through town called Chief White Feather. He is a descendant of Sitting Bull, of his fourth wife, born in the early 1900s. It’s truly intriguing. You can look him up. He sang opera. He could sing in 14 languages. He was brilliant. He sang for the queen of England during Roosevelt’s time. He wrote music. What happened was he became kind of a philanderer, and he lost the grasp of his family roots.”
The son of a Sioux father and an Ojibwe mother, Chief White Feather found Christianity and became a child evangelist. (It was a movement that began in the 1930s. Christian organizations focused on evangelizing children between 4 and 14 years old.)
“He took a duffel bag, went from town to town, put on his headdress,” Lifton said. “He would sing. He could play instruments and then he would get on the road, hitchhike, get a ride and go to the next town.”
Chief White Feather meandered his way into Lifton’s small town while she was a child.
“When he came to our town, he was accompanied by a cousin of my mother’s who lived on our block,” Lifton said. “We used to call her Aunt S. I could take my trike around the block because I was 5 or 6 years old. There’s an Indian. You can imagine how intriguing that was. I heard him several times. He would stay with her and her husband. “
Chief White Feather and Aunt S became blood brother and sister, with Lifton as the witness.
Lifton used a picture of herself sitting with Chief White Feather, cropped to remove Aunt S, on the cover of “Letters to the Chief.”
“(Chief White Feather) got heart problems,” Lifton said. “When I moved, the umbrella for this was when I was in college, I read a book that was letters to somebody and I said, ‘Brilliant, I’m going to do that.’ Somehow, I came up with ‘Letters to the Chief.’ They weren’t real letters. They were a way to communicate.”
“A Glimpse of the Other Americas” grew from a love of traveling and a passion for her husband, Lee, who died of a rare form of cancer in 2009 at the age of 57.
“That’s why we did this,” Lifton said. “We didn’t plan on him dying, but we were doing the hard stuff first. The idea was that we had a future, so we were going to do the other countries and then we were going to do the states.”
“My husband and I did tons of travel, and we never really had much money,” Lifton continued. “I would stash money in the file under ‘T’ for trip and then open it up and I would find someplace we could go for tickets for 10 days, doing the whole schtick for $1,500 or something. You can imagine what quality. We were hitchhiking, taking buses. This is called a backpacker’s memoir. This is Guayana, Belize.”
The stories are from a number of trips over a long period of time.
“We were in Guayana in 1990,” Lifton said. “We were in Ecuador in 1997 and Belize in 1983. You’re talking some time ago.”
“We went to Ecuador and we got out and we didn’t even know there was a revolution going on,” Lifton said. “We were just happy campers. They said the roads were going to be shut down. We hightailed it to the hills because we didn’t want to stay in the city where we knew there would be a lot more chaos.”
After two very different types of memoirs, Lifton decided to move on to writing folktales and fables.
“One thing that I have fostered over the years is, because now I deal with special-ed kids in the school, is imagination,” Lifton said. “You really have to keep your imagination alive. It’s just critical. I’ve refused to snuff out that portal, which people put pressure on me. I think that fables were a good challenge because I’m a half-full person, not a half-empty. I’ve always had that attitude. To have stories with animals that have a moral, that works for my personality. Also, the research, anything in these fables is substantiated. If I say the guy eats grass, he eats grass. I didn’t make up (things). If the story’s from Australia, I set it in Australia. There’s really a lot of background to all these things.”
Lifton can’t help but be moved when someone expresses that they enjoy her stories.
“I could weep,” Lifton said. “It’s kind of like putting a cookie in the file cabinet. You have to savor it, and you take a little bite at a time because you’ll get it out of nowhere.”