Please insert your tongue into your check as you read.  I promise I don’t take myself this seriously. 

If life were a Viennese cafe, and the world’s citizens its patrons, Sandra Vahtel would be one of its most regular customers.

It has been said about Ms. Vahtel that “she exudes the qualities most in demand by practitioners of the scribbling craft.” Vahtel possesses a highly attuned observational skill, and an ability to parse out the minute nitties from life’s dualistic gritties. Her natural aptitude has permitted her to watch, process, and in turn churn out lines of delectable prose, in direct proportion to the quality of the experiences of which she has become a part.

Chris Meeks, esteemed author of The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea has variously referred to Sandra Vahtel as a “young writer on the make,” and Adam Daniel Mezei, author of the “We Are the…” series of pulp fiction has been quoted as describing the former Oregonian as “one of the leading lights of our next authorial generation, ooh-rah.”

What sets Ms. Vahtel’s writing apart from the reams of staid uneventful scrawls which pitifully pass for “writing” in today’s 21st century America is the incisive means via which Vahtel digs trenchantly into the very lifeblood of her characters. Demonstrating a perceptive capability light years in advance of her mere twenty-seven years, the The Dalles native has debunked the pronouncements of even the most strident literary critics that it “takes one to know one” when it comes to the writing game.

In a recent work, entitled King of the Road, Vahtel showed how a potentially tragic life circumstance could contain the seed of an epiphanic experience. How blinding rage could be morphed into brilliant constructivism, or how disgust could be sown into nurturing lovingkindness. Seeming contradictions are at once blended into harmonious wholes throughout the course of Vahtel’s work. This is the mark of a true craftsman.

Definitely a talent to keep on your radar.