Bigfork resident and retired English and Spanish teacher for Kalispell high school and middle school, Pamella Hays, published her first book earlier this year and hopes to publish another.

“I had been thinking about writing a novel for fun, just to keep my brain active,” Hays said as she described how driving in a snow storm in Kalispell five years ago sparked her inspiration. “Drivers were sliding on the road and suddenly in my mind I knew my main character, Molly, in the car driving in the snowstorm. I got so involved with her, it was almost like she just led me along.”

Five years and 250 pages of typing on her computer later, her first novel, “Circling” was complete. She said it has two levels, on the surface, it’s about a contemporary Montanan family. Underneath it’s about the ongoing misunderstanding between the native and dominant cultures according to Hays.

She describes Molly as an “angry feminist” who moves to Montana on a whim and marries Red Hawk, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe from Browning. Once they begin their family they start to confront the two worlds they inherited and make sense of that juxtaposition in their own lives. She said the story is believable, but incorporates Native American mythology as well.

The story takes place in Kalispell and Browning. She said local residents will recognize many of the book’s locations and that the people and climate were taken right out of reality. She also said Glacier National Park plays an important role for Red Hawk and how he feels called back to the landscape after living in Seattle.

Initially, she didn’t anticipate getting the book published. She said she just took her time and enjoyed the process of writing. Prior to her book, she was only ever published in an educational magazine in the mid 1990s.

“Honestly, I was about three-fourths of the way through when I realized I was really serious about this and would like to know what other people think of my efforts,” Hays said. “You write because you want to reach out to other human beings.”

She said that so far reactions have been positive from her readers and they say the story carried them through it. For comments or questions about her book, go to www.facebook.com/CirclingNovel.

“Circling” is available at the Bigfork Museum in downtown Bigfork, Bookworks in Kalispell and Whitefish, Fact and Fiction in Missoula, and in eBook format through Amazon.

Now that her first book is done, she is returning to her first project, a book of semi-autobiographical essays, “Calling the Stars By Name,” about Montanan and American culture and the themes that run underneath their beliefs.

“I had and still have deep feelings about some of the problems we have in our culture and the conflicts we have going,” Hays said. “Everything from religion to politics to values, and I just felt that I wanted to address that in what I hoped would be a way to bring people a sense of harmony instead of a sense of conflict.”