About Bernie
Bernie (Bernadine) Visotto grew up at Caroline, Alberta, the youngest child in a family of ten.
Bernie wanted to be a writer even before she could write – making squiggly lines on the blackboard on their kitchen wall. Once in school, Bernie’s best subject was English, mainly because she loved writing stories.
After graduating from high school in 1975, Bernie married her current husband, Leland.
In 1985, after the stillborn birth of her son Adam, Bernie began writing poetry as a form of grief therapy.
Bernie’s four children are very accustomed to their mother’s story writing. When asked to write a story for any of her children’s classes at school, Bernie’s stories would have a rather sinister slant.
Bernie began working at the local weekly newspaper in Rocky Mountain House, Alberta in 1996, as a proofreader and bookkeeper. Whenever an opportunity would arise for Bernie to cover the occasional news story, she was in her element.
In 1999, Bernie decided to try her hand at writing a novel. By the time she was reaching the end of her first draft of that novel, she realized that she could write a series with the characters she had created.
In 2005 when Bernie’s mother was in palliative care, Bernie would write on her word processor while spending nights with her mom. The morning of her passing, her mom realized that the clicking of the word processor keys had stopped. When her mother had weakly repeated the word ‘write’ three times to Bernie, she finally understood what her mom was trying to tell her. Bernie assured her mom she would write lots of books – just like Jessica Fletcher – one of her mom’s favorites. Her mom smiled, closed her eyes and found the strength to say “movies too.” Those were her last words to Bernie and provided the initiative for her to consider getting her writing published.
At present, Bernie is president of Mystery Writers Ink in Calgary, Alberta. An organization that has been very instrumental in keeping Bernie writing and learning more and more about crime and mystery.
She is also writing as a columnist for The Mountaineer, with a readership of approximately 4500. Her opinion column is entitled ‘The Berd Cage’ and the restaurant critique column she does monthly is entitled ‘On The Menu’.
The novels she is writing, she refers to as her ‘Worth’ series. The first of which is “Worth Saving”, an army versus mafia suspense novel. The synopsis for “Worth Saving” is elsewhere on this website, so be sure to give it a read.
Still in the outline stage, her second novel in this series will definitely be ‘worth watching for’.