When I was in seventh grade, I had a teacher—Mrs. Lee—who reminded me of a Komodo dragon: big and snarling. She hated me. Or so I felt. When I entered that room, I kept my eyes on the floor and all but held my breath for fifty minutes. Then she assigned us our first writing topic, and I wrote about my brother, Ron, and the gentleness with which he once rescued baby possums from a mother who wasn’t just playing dead. Mrs. Lee praised it effusively. My first A plus. If writing could make a friend of a Komodo dragon, who knew what other miracles it might inspire? I was hooked.
Raised primarily in Independence, Missouri, I received my B.A. in history and English from the University of Missouri and my M.A. in the same subjects from Purdue.
Most of my adult life has revolved around teaching and writing. I taught screenwriting for years at San Francisco State and at U.C. Berkeley Extension; geography in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico; African literature in Kenya; middle school English in Kansas City and Independence, Missouri; and middle school core (English and history) in Hayward and San Ramon, California.
Teaching has been my second joy, writing ever my first. I’ve written numerous screenplays and treatments, three of which were optioned. My articles on Native American issues were published in the Village Voice, the Progressive and In These Times. I was hired to go scuba diving on almost every island in the Bahamas and write about it for the Divers Guide to the Caribbean, a doubly delightful job since it introduced me to the joys of diving in tropical water. When Wally Lamb called my novel Edgewise “courageous, heartfelt and unforgettable,” I wrote another thousand drafts just to be sure I’d done all I could to make the book worthy of his praise.
My nonwriting/nonteaching jobs include working as a secretary, a waitress, a film and medical transcriber, and as an interpreter for American doctors volunteering in Mexico. That last job was just amazing. We flew into remote Mayan villages that weren’t at that time accessible by road. We would buzz the landing “field” and hope we got all the pigs off it so that our little four-seater Cessna wouldn’t hit an animal and flip. Few if any villagers at that time spoke Spanish, let alone English, so someone would translate from Mayan to Spanish and I would then translate from Spanish to English for the doctors. I worried that I might be misinterpreting someone’s explanation of his/her health issues, so I bought an English-to-Spanish medical dictionary, which helped immensely.
Now I live with my husband in northern California. Most summers we spend a week on an Ozarks river with my brothers and their families. I love to sit and stare at the river and the altered images it reflects back. I aspire to do that for my readers: create a tapestry of reflections and characters that in some measure enriches their lives the way so many talented writers have enriched mine.