Local Woman Finds Her Calling in Children's Books

Mollie Wilson Ostroski has been translating messages for years. She travels all over translating for deaf students. Before that, she wrote letters for congressmen to their constituents. But now that her kids are grown and she works a little less, she’s settling into her real passion – translating important messages into rhyme for children’s appreciation.

Currently, she’s working on a series called Duck Tape, which features a duck and his family, and their adventures in life and in recycling with duck tape. She has published Duck Tape I and Duck Tape II, along with a coloring book of the illustrations from the other two.

She has written several books for children which have garnered praise and won her a few awards. But she discovered early on that finding a publisher is a near-impossible task, so she set to publishing her books herself under her own company, Rhyme Time.

Her books are for sale on Amazon.com and locally at Millrace Books. She also sells once a year at the Big E, where she says she sells lots of books. But, selling them is not really the object.

“It’s a labor of love,” she says.  “I think that I have a message for kids that’s gentle; I don’t beat them over the head.”

Ostroski, who grew up in Detroit, Michigan, says she started writing in earnest about 3 years ago, by revisiting a mountain of old poems she’d written through the years.

“I had been accumulating poems for a long time and so I had kind of had a portfolio that I’d written. I would just carry my books around and write,” she says.

Eventually, she pulled out a poem she’d written about bullying and sent it to her sister, a teacher in Maryland. Her sister blew up the poem and projected it on a window shade in her classroom. It has now become part of her sister’s curriculum, Ostroski says, that she uses to speak to her students.

Ostroski’s sister and others started to encourage her to pursue writing and she says, “I started thinking ‘maybe I should do this. Maybe there’s something there for me.’”

She moved on to writing a book about historical figures that kids can look up to. There has been a Christmas book and a few others. And she’s currently working on a Cape Cod-themed book about a duck who travels the cape trying to find a job he’s good at before realizing its best to just be himself.

“It showcases all the different towns and he finds in the end he enjoys being himself,” she says. ‘It’s an age-old theme but it still works.”

She got the idea to self-publish her books from the Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association, based in Avon.

“It’s very difficult to get published so you get creative, you do it yourself, you pull from familiar sources,” she says. “It’s a great experience putting a book together and I’ve enjoyed belonging to that group. I’ve met some wonderful people.”

Ostroski settled here when she married a Connecticut man. She raised her two daughters, Beth and Emily in Farmington, where they both still live.

While her children were little she wrote for “The Voice of the Valley,” a local weekly newspaper, before beginning translation for deaf students.

Before that, she worked as a legislative correspondent in both the Senate and House of Representatives, writing letters about subjects like gun control. During that time, when she was just 23 years old, she wrote letters for Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Here in Connecticut she wrote for Rep. Toby Moffett.

For now, she says she’ll keep writing books and see where it takes here. “I’ve got a lot of ideas,” she says.