Bio – About Nikki Rajala

Nikki Rajala has written two novels about voyageur times– Waters Like the Sky is the first, co-authored with her mother.

To create Book 2: Treacherous Waters, in The Chronicles of an Unlikely Voyageur series, Nikki researches and writes every day — learning whether voyageur paddles were red or how trades were conducted, watching a beaver being skinned, tasting wild edible plants. Each discovery is more fun than the last. She’s now considering what’s next in André’s life and how to extricate him from the disasters that befall in Book 3 of the series.

Some Like It Hot: The Sauna, Its Lore and Stories (North Star Press, 2000), is a reflection of her Finnish heritage and love of the family sauna.

She retired from teaching English as a second language and now works as a copy editor. If she’s not writing, she cooks for friends, plays with origami paper and watercolors, digs in her flower garden, adds books to her Little Free Library, reads a ton and does a crossword puzzle or two. She lives in Rockville, Minnesota, with her husband (and best friend) Bill Vossler, also a freelance writer.

Waters Like the Sky is Agnes Peloquin Rajala’s fourth published book. She wrote A Tale for Saint Urho’s Tay and Of Finnish Ways under the name Aini Rajanen and Sweden: A Good Life for All as Kari Olsson. (All three books were published by Dillon Press of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and are out of print.) Among her many interests, Agnes enjoyed writing — her Christmas letters were filled with clever puns. From her life and genealogy research, she wrote 11 family histories, the most recent about her career as a teacher in rural one-room schools, as well as four cookbooks. She died October 14, 2013.