I grew up in a round red house in Santa Cruz, California, six blocks from the ocean. I spent my time riding my bike, reading incessantly, and sun tanning at the beach, always with friends and a cooler of cheap beer, never with the benefit of sunscreen. My college days were spent at University of California at Irvine where I studied English with a writing emphasis and then I studied at UC Santa Cruz taking a degree in education. I imagined I would be a teacher like my mother, or maybe I would write for magazines, but what I really wanted to do was to stay at home with my children, and I did. I gardened, cooked, volunteered at their school. When my youngest entered preschool, I took a writing class and then I took another. Soon I gave up gardening and took up early rising until my morning shufflings—making coffee, letting the dog out, writing at my desk—woke the household at five. With my kids in elementary school I wrote in coffeehouses and at the library, in the parking lot where I waited for them after school. I published in literary journals,The Bellingham Review, Inkwell Magazine, Third Coast, Fourth Genre, Hunger Mountain, to name a few, and those publications sustained me, they allowed me to continue believing in my work. I was lucky enough to win some prizes, John Steinbeck Award, Tobias Wolff Award, H.E. Francis Award, I was short listed in Best American Short Stories. All of this led me to Warren Wilson College for graduate school where I received my MFA in fiction. Through the raising of my family I continued writing. As my youngest entered college and I teetered on the cusp of an empty nest as well as a new decade of my life, I published my collection, SHOUT HER LOVELY NAME.. There was a lovely symmetry to my timeline and if I put it in a story, no one would believe it.
Currently, I am working on a novel about the geometry of family life, the families we are born into and the families we create and sustain by choice. We each reveal our best and worst selves within our homes and somehow, through it all, we mostly continue to love each other. That conflict and dedication interests me, both within our homes and within ourselves.