Marcella Pixley: Hello, my name is Marcella Pixley. When I was growing up, my family and the kids in my neighborhood and my friends all called me Marcie and my last name was Fleischman. When I started becoming interested in becoming a writer, sometime in middle school, one of my English teachers said that Marcella, which is my full name, is a much more writerly name. And he started calling me Marcella and I started signing my name Marcella for the first time. It was kind of like a whispered prayer to one day becoming a writer. And then, in college, when I met my husband whose last name is Pixley, I thought that besides him being a wonderful person that I wanted to marry, that Marcella Pixley would be a good name for an author. And I hoped that one day I would become one.