Meet Author Doris Guggisberg

Doris Guggisberg has been a writer for most of her life, but she spent the first several years writing music.  She wrote children’s musicals, lullabies, wedding songs, and worship songs.  She retired from that, only to pick up her pencil and write again – this time, stories.  Detours is her first novel.

Raised on a farm in Nebraska, she attended Concordia University in Seward, Nebraska, where she majored in elementary music education. Still, after student teaching, she realized she really didn’t want to be in the classroom after all.  She has lived in Detroit, Michigan, St. Paul, Minnesota, and several rural communities in Minnesota where she and her husband now live, every day in awe of the love of Jesus and the need for his guidance.

She was the children’s librarian in Redwood Falls, Minnesota, for several years, happily surrounded by books and children.  She still enjoys playing the piano, the one she used to write all of her music, and she writes her stories in a room filled with a collection of Noah’s arks, a constant reminder that God will take care of her.  When she wrote Detours, she actually started with the title, thinking of the many twists and turns her life has taken and knowing that it’s God’s detours that keep us on track. “It’s not that I wanted so much to write this story,” she states.  “It’s a story that wanted to be written.”