When Cassie Shrum was pregnant, her mother, Christy, suggested she start writing again as a legacy for her yet-to-beborn daughter, Piper.

“My mom’s quiet, so when she says something,” Cassie said, “it’s usually short and sweet, but very powerful.”

Cassie loved the idea, not only for Piper and her two older brothers, Porter and Declin, but for the grandchildren and greatgrandchildren she would one day have.

She’d always loved reading and writing. “I don’t remember a time that I didn’t,” she recalled. “My mom said before I could read myself, I wanted to be read to. I would sit down and practice writing, and as soon as I could form the words, I was writing stories.”

When she was five or six, she wrote “The Pirate Who Wouldn’t Stop Saying Argh.” It became her family’s favorite story. “It was about a pirate who wouldn’t stop saying ‘Argh,’ so his shipmates threw him overboard.”

She devoured the Junie B. Jones series and read books like “Hatchet” and “The Giver” cover to cover as she got older. Terri Phillips, her seventh-teacher English teacher at Tracy Elementary School, always encouraged her writing – something Cassie truly appreciated. “I’ve stayed in touch with her throughout the years.”

High school was hard for teenage Cassie. When an unkind classmate teased her about her weight, the sheltered, sometimes anxious, teen was hurt. “I wanted to be invisible after that.”

After graduating from Grundy County High School in 2013, Cassie worked briefly as bank teller in Monteagle. She didn’t know it then, but one of her regular customers, David Smith, who dropped off deposits for the Smoke House Restaurant in her drive-thru lane, would one day become a very important part of her life. “It wasn’t until years later that we even went on a date,” she laughed.

Realizing quickly that banking wasn’t for her, she became a 911 dispatcher for the next five years. “I loved it,” she said. “Still to this day, that was one of my favorite jobs.”

The pay was low, however, and the hours were rough – usually a 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift. “It’s one of those jobs where you don’t go to a day-shift position until somebody retires,” Cassie explained. Night shift was exciting, but also gut wrenching. “I remember a couple of times things would happen to some of my classmates that were hard to handle.”

When she left dispatching, she worked for Pilot in Monteagle because the flexible hours allowed her to complete medical assistant school and eventually take better- paying jobs, but the medical field wasn’t a good fit for her either. When she got laid off after COVID-19 hit, she found herself helping her mom take care of her grandmother who had Alzheimer’s.

“After she passed away, I went back to school,” said Cassie, who earned her associate’s degree in social work from Chattanooga State. “I thought that’s what she would have wanted me to do.” She’d always loved kids and wanted to be an advocate for them. Her first social work job was with Head Start in Dunlap, but the long commute and the low pay wore her down. “It was an emotionally difficult job for that pay,” she said.

She decided to pursue a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice instead of social work and took her current job based in Grundy County doing juvenile probation. She graduates this December with her degree from Maryville University in St. Louis.

That wasn’t the only change in her life. She’d been through her share of men who weren’t good to her. “Right before my granny died, I started praying for somebody who would treat me the way I wanted to be treated,” she said. She commented on a Facebook post from the bank-deposit guy, who was now a painter and also single.

“He wound up asking me if I wanted to go out finally,” she laughed and admitted she was about ready to ask him herself. “He’s sort of naïve to when he’s being flirted with.” Their first date was at Hank’s Corner Grille in Tracy City. She was blown away that he came to the front door and knocked when he picked her up – she was used to dates honking in the driveway.

“I opened the door, and he just smiled,” she said. His smile about did her in. “He was as nice a guy as I always knew he was. To this day, he’s one of the best people I’ve ever met.”

They’ve been together for five years now and welcomed baby Piper Josie on Aug. 30, 2025. It was during Cassie’s pregnancy that her mom suggest she start writing again.

“I had stopped for a long time,” Cassie said. “I was out in the world, and I just didn’t do it as much anymore. It’s thanks to her that I started doing it again. She has been such an inspiration and encouragement to me. I am so proud of her and how much she’s overcome in her life while still being gentle and kind to everyone around her, even when the world hasn’t been gentle and kind to her.”

Cassie drew on her work at Head Start and in juvenile justice as she wrote her first children’s book “Ant Needs to Rant!” The paperback, which sells for $12.99 on Amazon, follows a little ant who has a problem that he wants to rant about.

“He goes through a series of different animals in the forest, and they all tell him he’s too small to have a big problem, so he goes back to his ant hill utterly defeated,” Cassie said. “Grandpa Groundhog teaches him you’re not too small to have a big problem. If it feels like a big deal to you, then it is a big deal, and they work it out together. It’s easy for adults to dismiss what a kid thinks is a big deal, not realizing that it is a big deal because that’s the only life experience they have so far.”

She hopes that parents reading the book with their children will see it as an opportunity to help their little ones learn how to work through their problems. “The thing I enjoy most about the writing process for children’s books is to use the imagination I’ve been given to teach my kids lessons and values I believe in by using depictions that they will understand.

“I didn’t want to rely on the world to teach these values that are so important; I wanted to instill them in my own way, in hopes that not just my children, but all the children and parents who read these stories, can take the message and apply it in real life.”

For her second book, “Spicy Tuna,” available for $18.99 on Amazon, she collaborated with local illustrator Kassadi Blalock Chance. “I used Canva to illustrate the first one, and, boy, I got a lot of hate for doing that,” Cassie said. “I was doing the best I could with what I had at the time.”

When she shared the new book on the Monteagle Bulletin Board, she got a pretty ugly comment, but something good came out of that online ugliness. Kassadi’s mom, Nicole Blalock, responded that her daughter was an artist and had always wanted to illustrate a picture book.

“It was as simple as that,” Cassie said. “I already had the next story done, so I reached out to her daughter. I was honest. I said I knew what illustrations were worth and what artists charge, and that I couldn’t afford that much – that’s why I didn’t do it the first time. She is really sweet and still wanted to be a part of it. We negotiated a price that I could afford that was still decent, but still less than what she deserved for it.”

This second book is about two boys who finally adopt a much-longed-for kitten from the animal shelter and are upset when it does not adjust well. “They don’t know what they’re doing wrong, why the kitten is not happy to be there, and why it doesn’t love them as much as they love it,” Cassie said. “Later on, they make a new friend who teaches them from the perspective of a child who’s been through foster care and adoption what the kitten is feeling and helps them learn that you have to allow space and time for the kitten to trust them.”

Cassie views this story as a way for parents to talk to their kids about adoption and foster care. “What I want parents to know is that it’s okay to be uncertain about how to approach and address sensitive topics. But uncertainty shouldn’t lead to avoidance. Avoidance doesn’t erase the reality that so many children do experience foster care and adoption for various reasons.

“My stories are meant to be icebreakers, conversation starters. The way to make positive change begins at home with the way we teach our children how to interact with others who have different, and sometimes more difficult, struggles. Patience, kindness, and acceptance are not difficult to instill in children at a young age. They are incredibly important.”

She’s nearly completed her third book, “Huxley the Halloween Penguin.” The premise is a penguin family moves to a town where it’s Halloween all year round because they love Halloween, but some townsfolk think the penguins should live in a Christmas town.

“It’s about being an outsider somewhere and how eventually someone who befriends you can help you adjust or integrate. I’m not sure if it’s going to come across as integrating or being an outcast, or if it will be perceived as a bullying story. Either one, I think, is beneficial.”

Cassie’s books are available exclusively on Amazon.