Deon L. Jaccard, (creator of the pseudonym, Dinny Lawrance,) is a retired museum educator and author of nonfiction articles, monographs and taught museum collection-inspired courses at local colleges. Jaccard designed programs and taught museum course work for Smithsonian and Elderhostel traveling study groups. For 37 years Jaccard applied her creed, Education with Pleasure, to her goal: to interpret---for the delectation of all ages of visitors---collections belonging to art and human history museums, as well as interpreting architecture in local historic districts. Jaccard taught visitors and docents-in-training how to see surviving artifacts, images and buildings as eloquent reflections of the pulse of our predecessors' lives.

Jaccard's career culminated in a chance discovery of Amelia Island, Fla., site of an unparalleled sweep of 50 centuries of documented history, but lacking a museum to express the stunning flow of humanity. Jaccard founded, developed, and for 12 years, led Florida's only spoken history museum, an award-winning educational institution, created in an abandoned jail. Jaccard wrote "The Historic Splendor of Amelia Island," a large, lavishly illustrated, sequential true story, told in her spoken history style.

The Kirkus-reviewed memoir titled "I Promised God" was written shortly after Jaccard's retirement, ending her stress-relieving career in museum education. Unknown to colleagues, but running concurrently for 20 years with Jaccard's professional commitments, were tortured, overriding mandates demanding new means to find help to alleviate unendurable suffering by her son, her family and herself. She outrageously promised God, in wrenching prayer, that she would write and publish her son's God-given escape from the agony of ceaseless slogging through the hellish mire, known as mental illness, whenever her son's agony would end. She had finally felt her blind powerlessness as a faithless, desolate mother – now at last alone and in impotent control no longer.

“Lawrance’s debut memoir is a magnanimous appraisal of how mental illness affects her family, and the respite she found through intellectual stimulation on the road from agnosticism to faith.”
– Kirkus Reviews