Diane Arkenstone’s new children’s book begins simply: “There was once a young girl, who saw the world for what it was, beautiful.” Titled The Robe of Rainbow Feathers, it’s a deeply charming story of a young girl who lives in a small house with a big garden full of flowers and trees and animals and birds.
Buy the book
Local author Diane Arkenstone’s new children’s book, The Robe of Rainbow Feathers, is available on amazon.com. You can learn more about the Arroyo Grande resident on her website, dianearkenstone.com.
Like all good stories, it has a beginning, a muddle (as American writer Peter De Vries famously quipped), and an end. In this case, the muddle is when the little girl meets an old man on her way to town, who tells her “very bad news of things in the world, of a war and death and many terrible and sad things.” Soon, the young girl’s happy disposition sours as she ruminates on the world’s troubles. Her path forward is learning to see the world’s beauty again. Spoiler alert! In the end, the young girl is an old woman reflecting on her beautiful life before she transitions to the next phase.
“My mom had passed, and I was just channeling grief, and this story just came out, and I thought, ‘Gosh, that might make a nice little story or a book or something,’” Arkenstone said, explaining her book’s message during a recent phone call from her home in the Arroyo Grande area. “It’s pretty much a circle of life. You grow up and then you pass on. But it gives children hope that it’s not the end, that maybe there’s something else, maybe it’s heaven, maybe it’s whatever it could be, but the energy of the consciousness of the soul and spirit moves on or lives on. You can’t really destroy energy, but that’s hard to explain to a child.
“So, it’s that, and then the legacy that she left, the good things that you do in life, that kind of keeps you alive in the hearts of people that you’ve touched—a story like that. And, of course, take care of the Earth. It’s very precious.”
There’s certainly a lot to unpack for a young child, and this is a terrific book to read to a very young kid or give to a child learning to read.
Another of its most important lessons is that when we feed our minds positive things, we have a positive life, and when we feed our minds negative things and dwell on the negative, we have a negative life. It’s an important lesson not just for children but for everyone.
“I think in the future that’s going to be the same thing with medicine,” Arkenstone elaborated. “Not necessarily medicine we’re going to take but how our minds will help heal the body with the good thoughts and the good energy. I think that there’s a lot to that. Experiments have been done that if you have two plants and you yell at one, call it bad names, it doesn’t do well, and the one that you love and say good words to does do well.”
Arkenstone is perhaps best known as a musician with dozens and dozens of recordings both under her name and as Celtic duo Enaid & Einalem. She’s also released albums under Ah Nee Mah, Earth Trybe, and The Marquis Ensemble. This year alone, she released 10 New Age albums. The trained opera singer and multi-instrumentalist plays guitar, keyboard, wood flutes, dulcimer, synthesizers, percussion, metal drum, and kalimbas. She’s been releasing music since 2000.
In recent years, she’s turned some of her impressive energy to children’s books and titles such as Tippy Tap Toes, It Happened on Cherry Street, Little Leaf’s Big Adventure, her current book, and coming up, Barnyard Lyrics and Fairytale Limericks due out soon. She also released a book of poetry designed for young adults called The Lucky Ones: Poems about life, love, and wonder.
Calling her prolific is an understatement.
The Robe of Rainbow Feathers is a project encompassing more than just the charmingly illustrated book. Designed for children ages 3- to 6-years-old, the story will be available in three formats—the book (53 pages with 946 words), a forthcoming audio book, and as an animated short film. The project’s collaborators include Brooklyn illustrator Anja Silbar, Mexican animator Isaac David Quesada, and director Wesley Price from SLO’s The Sauce Pot Studios that produced the film, which is narrated by Arkenstone. Local violinist and composer Vince Cimo wrote and played the score for the animated short.
Arkenstone is local through and through, born in Paso Robles, and raised on a ranch.
“Then we moved to Templeton and I went to went to school that was off of Vineyard Drive,” she said. “It was awesome. We’d ride our horses to school. The woodshop class made a place to tie up the horses for us, which was great.”
Arkenstone left the Central Coast for a while and taught music to children in Los Angeles for 20 years, and though she doesn’t have any kids herself, she developed an affinity for them, which led to her love of storytelling.
“I just absolutely love children and have a lot of nieces, nephews, and stepchildren, so it was just stories to tell them, and they turned into books,” she explained.
Arkenstone certainly found a complementary illustrator in Silbar, whose artwork for the book is colorful and whimsical and lively.
“She’s absolutely fabulous,” Arkenstone gushed. “She does a lot of work for The New York Times and all sorts of things. This is the third book she’s done [with me] and she’ll be doing the next one that’s coming out.”
Their collaborative process is a mix of Arkenstone explaining her vision and simply letting Silbar read the text and develop ideas on her own.
“It’s a little bit of both. I’ll send her the manuscript or the words and tell her, ‘This is a vision that I see,’ and then she just runs with it, and then we make little refinements along the way.”
Though Arkenstone currently doesn’t have any plans for readings, she donates copies of all her books to local libraries. She wants to share her positive message with as many children as possible.
“We had a sun dial on our lawn, and it said, ‘Let others tell of storms and showers, I’ll only count your sunny hours,’ and I’ve always lived by that. I think that’s so powerful because when you speak of positive things and you are positive, it really uplifts your own self; it’s an attractant for people around you. People like positive things. And that’s pretty much the story.
“All the children’s books I’ve written are about positive things in life.” ∆
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Dec 4-14, 2025.