"These are the ones who taught me about storytelling," she says quietly with a smile, lightly running her slender fingers from face to face.

She stops at a dark-haired woman, a full-blood Shawnee Indian with strong cheekbones, glancing to the right, her maternal great-grandmother

"I've never met her," she says, " but I know her."

Woodruff, whose ancestry includes Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee, German and Russian descent, grew up listening to American Indian stories. She said the spirits of her ancestors guide her work.

A native New Mexican and accomplished author of both fiction and nonfiction, Woodruff grew up in Corrales, with an older brother and two sisters. She now lives at a remote ranch near Abo, where she moved 18 years ago.

While her books don't have the same themes, there are characters who stay with her, guiding the words, the story.

"The characters wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote it," she said.

They come not only from people she knew, even animals she knew, but from the spirits of the Anasazi people who once lived where the Abo ruins lay.

"I would just sit outside on the hill. After a while I heard people talking, pretty soon it was funny," she says. "That's the thing about Abo; if you sit quietly long enough, you can hear the people. If it's totally quiet, with no tourists, you can hear them gossiping. Making dinner. They were family people with a tremendous sense of humor."

Grounded in nonfiction writing, Woodruff got started by publishing articles in medical journals. While living in California, she spent nearly 20 years working as an occupational therapist. Her first book, "Traditional Stories and Food: An American Indian Remembers a Folkloric Cookbook," published in 1990, is a collection of foods and recipes from Native cultures.

She moved into fiction after reading a true story of Californian nuns murdered and dumped in a river in Nicaragua in the early 1980s.

"I wanted to change history," she says. "I wanted to let them live. So I created a soldier who was told to kill them, but he didn't. He told them to disappear."

That's what she loves about fiction, taking true facts and putting a unique twist on them.

She researches more for her fiction novels than nonfiction. Her book, "The Shiloh Renewal," published in 1998, tells the story of a young girl who is injured in an accident and is visited by the ghosts of Civil War soldiers killed in the battle of Shiloh. The book was named by the state of Tennessee as one of the 15 best historical fiction books ever written.

Countless short stories, magazine and newspaper articles, and books later, Woodruff has turned to writing full-time. Her most recent novel, "Polar Bears in the Kitchen," released two weeks ago, is her favorite, and the first written with no other jobs or commitments pending.

A copy sits with the rest of her books on top of a table between two book-stops in her parents' living room.

"Polar Bears" is Woodruff's making good of her promise to her mother days before she died of heart failure a year ago.

"My mother worried about the polar bears. She would stay up at night and worry that they were drowning. One of the last things she said to me was, 'Who's going to care for the polar bears?' And I told her I would. And I did what I promised her. I brought attention to the polar bears — just not in a way you'd expect."

Her mother, a nurse, taught her to love reading.

"She read all the time. She told me to go to the library and bring home as many books as I could carry. And I did. I read everything." She is now working on her next project, co-authoring a self-help book with Mark Blotcky, a psychiatrist from Dallas.

She mainly writes mysteries and suspense novels, but New Mexico is usually a fixture in her work, a place close to her heart.

"I've been all over the world, and there's no where like this place," she says. "They call it the Land of Enchantment. And it is."

Woodruff will sign books at the Mountainair Fourth of July Jubilee from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. She will also be at Run Rally and Rock in Edgewood on Aug. 8, and back to Mountainair for the Sunflower Festival on Aug. 22.

To learn more about Woodruff and her work, visit her Web site at http://www.joanlesliewoodruff.com/.