About the Carleton Sisters, my debut novel, will be published by She Writes Press in the spring of 2023. This culminates a journey begun as a child growing up in western South Dakota when my sisters and I spent summer afternoons haunting the local Catholic cemetery where we made up stories about the dead. Much later, when my poetry veered in the direction of story-telling, I shouldn’t have been surprised. By now, at seventy-nine, I’ve knocked on many doors since I first began writing seriously in the early '70s. I was then a re-entry student at San Francisco State University in my early thirties, and I focused on poetry in both undergraduate and graduate studies. While studying with Stan Rice, his wife Anne Rice’s publication, Interview with A Vampire, inspired me to try my hand at fiction. It was the ‘70s and reason enough for my family to “drop out” and migrate to Cannon Beach, Oregon. We owned a small motel with another family which we ran while our sons graduated from high school. In 1979, I self-published a book of poetry, The Double Fire Burning. But my heart has always vibrated loudest in storytelling.

A great influence on my finishing graduate school and teaching was Richard Hugo, someone I studied poetry with during the summers when he came from Montana to Cannon Beach. Though I taught for a few years in a local junior college, I found that teaching absorbed all my creative energy. I soon returned to graduate school in San Francisco to become a family therapist, a profession I knew would carry me into my 80s. With a specialty in addictive processes, I continue the work I started thirty years ago.

I’ve been fortunate to have two major fiction writing teachers along the way: Janet Fitch (White Oleander) when I lived in San Diego for ten years where I worked in a psychiatric hospital. On my return to Oregon, I studied further with Tom Spanbauer (The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon) and the Dangerous Writers. During that long apprenticeship, I completed three novels and a book of essays. Thematically, the pursuit of agency and empowerment propels my female characters in both my creative and therapeutic work. Today, I live and work in Portland, Oregon. My essays have appeared in The Big Smoke, an online magazine.