about me

I was born and raised in Bellingham, Washington, and read books  about far-off places and adventures whenever I wasn’t playing on the beach or in a tree. Then I was determined to have my own adventures. I went away to study first at Smith College, in Massachusetts and then at the University of Geneva, in Switzerland. I met my husband there, and while exploring his native country over the following years, I dreamed of capturing a little bit of it in writing. Mountains of Manhattan made that dream come true.

Mountains of Manhattan was inspired by true events in the lives of my mother and my husband’s great aunt, who each lived in New York City in the 1950s. On a visit there several years ago, I started to ask myself, what if those two women had met? What would one have said to the other? Would they have been friends? That’s how Helen and Clementine came to exist and to want their stories to be written.

My husband and I have four children and a black lab named Toby.  We live outside of Seattle, Washington, in a big rambling house where I continue my writing life while making time for gardening, hiking, boating, and sometimes…the laundry.

I am also a correspondent for WORLD Magazine and WORLD Radio (www.wng.org) and am working on my next novel. I enjoy reading the kind of stories where the big questions of life hit the pavement of ordinary tasks performed by ordinary people. Those are the kind of stories I like to write. I hope you like them too.

 

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