Valerie Hagenbush spent years working in other fields before trying her hand at writing. She studied filmmaking at Ohio State University and later veterinary technology at the University of Cincinnati. Valerie and her husband raised their two daughters in Ohio and Illinois, then relocated to Arizona for her husband’s job. She taught in the local school district before retiring, writing Talking White Owl on the side.

Whereas Valerie’s first novel, "Good-bye and Good Riddance," published in 2005, was based on her hitchhiking experiences during her college years in the 1970s, using a neighborhood she had once lived in for its setting, that wasn’t the case with "Talking White Owl." How does someone who has never met any Lakota people nor visited their reservations write about them? The main character remained an unnamed figure in Valerie’s imagination for decades, until one day while she was working on another book, Viktor Talking White Owl, a Lakota boy, started to recount his story to her.