Leigh Podgorski

I am an award winning playwright and screen writer who began writing novels in 2010 with my debut novel THE WOMEN DEBROWSKA, the story of a family interwoven with 250 years of Polish history and the indomitable spirit of the Polish people.
"...Very beautiful, powerful, and deeply touching...Besides that... it is a love letter to Poland..." M. Serra
"When the plane crashed...carrying the Polish statesmen...I felt as if they were brethren of mine. Ms. Podgorski's saga told the story of Polish history in a way that made its memories mine." C Herron
"The story is powerful and heartbreaking, and at heart, a love story..." Jackie Maxwell
"Flowing with great energy and speed..." G White
"... a saga of love, inter-generational (and international) family affairs, and history..." Douglas Glenn Clark
…DEBROWSKA was followed by OURAY’S PEAK, a coming age novel that follows the journey of Kristin Tabor as she treks cross-country journey to find her mother, and eventually, her heart.
2012 saw the publication of the first two books of the Stone Quest Series: DESERT CHIMERA and GALLOWS ASCENDING which follow the journey of recluse, tracker, and reluctant psychic visionary Luke Stone, and take the reader deep within Luke's paranormal universe. NEURI SHAPE-SHIFTER, the third book was completed in 2014.
I have had the privilege to interview two strong influential women and to write about them.
WINDSTORM is a one-act play about Dr. Elisabeth Kubler Ross detailing the moment in her life after LIFE magazine did a story on her and her patient Eva who was dying of leukemia. Dr. Kubler Ross was the only doctor at the University of Chicago who had the courage to talk to patients about death, and it almost ended her career. As she ventured deeper into this realm, as she told me in my 1985 interview, she began to have visions, and saw one of her patients outside her office. However, that patient had already passed on. Dr. Ross told me it was her dying patients who taught her not how to die, but how to live.
While producing the play festival CelebrateWomen, the other great woman I interviewed was Cahuilla elder Katherine Siva Saubel. Dr. Saubel, like Dr Ross, was a great healer, and a great visionary. She could call the wind by whistling for it to blow down from the mountains to cool the steaming valley below. From her oral history, I wrote first the play WE ARE STILL HERE; then, as a recipient of a California Council for the Humanities grant, I adapted the play for a documentary of the same title.
"The film also portrays the Creation mythology of the Cahuilla, performed by a Native American cast, which is well done and sustains viewer interest. There are a lot of important ideas and traditions illuminated here. [The]film [s] will be appreciated by history buffs, students of Native American history, and general viewers.--Margaret B. Miller, Univ. of South Dakota Lib., Vermillion"--Library Journal Review.
I have recently completed my first love story, WESTERN SONG, which was released by Solstice Publishing. Currently, I am working on AMARA a Broadway murder mystery set in 1949, which will be followed by the fourth book in the STONE QUEST series: REDEMPTION: THE FINAL RECKONING.
More information about me and my work can be found at my web site: www.violethillsproductions.com
"...Very beautiful, powerful, and deeply touching...Besides that... it is a love letter to Poland..." M. Serra
"When the plane crashed...carrying the Polish statesmen...I felt as if they were brethren of mine. Ms. Podgorski's saga told the story of Polish history in a way that made its memories mine." C Herron
"The story is powerful and heartbreaking, and at heart, a love story..." Jackie Maxwell
"Flowing with great energy and speed..." G White
"... a saga of love, inter-generational (and international) family affairs, and history..." Douglas Glenn Clark
…DEBROWSKA was followed by OURAY’S PEAK, a coming age novel that follows the journey of Kristin Tabor as she treks cross-country journey to find her mother, and eventually, her heart.
2012 saw the publication of the first two books of the Stone Quest Series: DESERT CHIMERA and GALLOWS ASCENDING which follow the journey of recluse, tracker, and reluctant psychic visionary Luke Stone, and take the reader deep within Luke's paranormal universe. NEURI SHAPE-SHIFTER, the third book was completed in 2014.
I have had the privilege to interview two strong influential women and to write about them.
WINDSTORM is a one-act play about Dr. Elisabeth Kubler Ross detailing the moment in her life after LIFE magazine did a story on her and her patient Eva who was dying of leukemia. Dr. Kubler Ross was the only doctor at the University of Chicago who had the courage to talk to patients about death, and it almost ended her career. As she ventured deeper into this realm, as she told me in my 1985 interview, she began to have visions, and saw one of her patients outside her office. However, that patient had already passed on. Dr. Ross told me it was her dying patients who taught her not how to die, but how to live.
While producing the play festival CelebrateWomen, the other great woman I interviewed was Cahuilla elder Katherine Siva Saubel. Dr. Saubel, like Dr Ross, was a great healer, and a great visionary. She could call the wind by whistling for it to blow down from the mountains to cool the steaming valley below. From her oral history, I wrote first the play WE ARE STILL HERE; then, as a recipient of a California Council for the Humanities grant, I adapted the play for a documentary of the same title.
"The film also portrays the Creation mythology of the Cahuilla, performed by a Native American cast, which is well done and sustains viewer interest. There are a lot of important ideas and traditions illuminated here. [The]film [s] will be appreciated by history buffs, students of Native American history, and general viewers.--Margaret B. Miller, Univ. of South Dakota Lib., Vermillion"--Library Journal Review.
I have recently completed my first love story, WESTERN SONG, which was released by Solstice Publishing. Currently, I am working on AMARA a Broadway murder mystery set in 1949, which will be followed by the fourth book in the STONE QUEST series: REDEMPTION: THE FINAL RECKONING.
More information about me and my work can be found at my web site: www.violethillsproductions.com
Western Song
Contemporary Romance
Western Song is a timeless love story filled with rich unique characters played out beneath the wide Wyoming sky about a bull riding rancher and his recently deceased best buddy’s Thai immigrant mail order bride; as she learns the true power of freedom, he discovers he’s lost his heart. Western Song sample |
Desert Chimera
Mystery/Occult
Desert Chimera, the first book in the Mystic Mystery Stone Quest Series, introduces the reader to recluse, tracker, and reluctant twenty-eight year old psychic visionary Luke Stone and to his paranormal universe. When Luke’s Cherokee shaman guide suddenly dies, Luke sets off on a desperate cross-country quest that ends in the heart of Death Valley, and face to face with his nemesis, the black magician Armand Jacobi from whom Luke thought he had escaped seven years ago. The battle that ensues, both psychological and physical, leaves fellow travelers lives hanging in the balance—including the life of lovely Consuelo Arroyo with whom Luke is falling in love. As Luke confronts his enemy, he is also forced to face the darkest secrets of his past. Will this battle be his final destruction or his ultimate redemption? |
Gallows Ascending
Mystery/Occult
GALLOWS ASCENDING continues the saga of tracker and psychic visionary Luke Stone in Book Two of the Stone Quest Series. It is thirteen years after the confrontation with Luke's nemesis, black magician Armand Jacobi in Death Valley. Luke's wife Consuelo, whom he met during that confrontation, has died and Luke has once again escaped into exile-- this time his wanderings have taken him to the seaside village of New Camen, NH. Into his solitude has dropped Dr. Bethany Rutledge. Accused of the murder of her eight year old daughter, stripped of her license to practice medicine, her marriage to politician Adrian Montzaire in tatters, Beth is haunted nightly by the chilling vision of a woman's brutal death by hanging. Adding to the mix is the disappearance of a young boy-- his vanishing centered in the tiny hamlet of New Camen. Then, Mountzaire turns up dead-- in the sand at the edge of the sea-- right beside his slowly awakening wife. Now Luke must not only find the lost boy but save his beloved from the same fate that haunts her restless terrifying dreams. |
Neuri Shape-Shifter
Mystery/Occult
Neuri Shape-Shifter is the third book in the Mystic Mystery Stone Quest series. Twenty-five years after psychic tracker Luke Stone fought his nemesis the black magician Armand Jacobi in the heart of Death Valley, Armand is back. After a series of adolescent girls goes missing from Manhattan’s Lower East, Luke’s former stomping grounds, retired NYC detective Stan Banor reaches out to Luke for help. But the stakes suddenly go sky-high when Luke’s own daughter, Bridget Grace, a psychic even more powerful than her father, disappears leaving behind a cryptic note. As Stan and Luke race against the clock to find the girls, all clues point to Armand Jacobi. Gregorian chants hum, Catholic Saints animate, and fairy lanterns glow as Luke Stone chases his nemesis from New Camen, NH to Alphabet City, NY to the Leelanau Peninsula of Northern Michigan in a battle to save his daughter's life. |
Ouray's Peak
The Women Debrowska
Historical Fiction
Anatola Debrowska has a family spinning into separate orbits and a life spiraling into soul-stealing monotony when the 25 year old son she gave up at birth suddenly materializes on her doorstep. The reunion does not go smoothly. When Pyotr returns abruptly to the East Coast, Anatola, determined not to lose her son a second time, follows. With sister Clarisse in tow, she finds him disheveled and drunken, and together they trundle him off to Aunt Alka’s house. There a treasure trove of Debrowska-Debski archives left by Frances, the family matriarch, is revealed. Eventually, Anatola is able to break through Pytor’s defenses, and the archaeological dig begins. The archives: letters, diaries, and Frances’s enigmatic poetry, lead Anatola on a journey that begins in Debowiec, Poland in January 1756 and follows the family as it is torn apart by loyalists and revolutionaries, riches and poverty, oppression and war and the partitions of a beloved homeland. The Women Debrowska interweaves the personal story of a family with the history of a nation driven by an endearing spirit of hope that refused to be conquered, a spirit unique to the Polish character, a spirit that soared during even her darkest most desperate hours. |