Lesley Miles a practicing architect for 40 years has designed schools, libraries and community spaces. She wrote her first story about her grandfather, an ANZAC in WWI, while in New Zealand in 2018. Reading, A London Love Story, on a KQED Perspectives segment encouraged her to start writing about her experiences in Guatemala in the late 1970s. 

Her memoir All Things Hidden: A Witness to Paradise Lost, covers her time in Ixcán, Guatemala, her return and search for what happened to the community. 

Studying with Corporeal Writing, writer Haley Campbell, and author and teacher Jordan Rosenfeld, she writes as she notes, just the facts. When she left Ixcán in 1979, she stored textiles, letters, journals and photos of the two years she had lived in a village of 15 families. Unboxing this hidden period of her life, she relives this time, writing of her experiences including a historical perspective. 

Her Substack, I’ve Got a Story for That, runs the gamut from architecture and Guatemala to stories about war,  pets, children and plants. www.lesleylmiles.com